Store /side chats in session logs

Open 💬 4 comments Opened Apr 29, 2026 by joshka

💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What variant of Codex are you using?

cli

What feature would you like to see?

/side is ephemeral by design, but the chats that you might have there are sometimes end up producing useful context for future work. Would be nice to be able to easily store these without having to tell the chat export some sort of handoff markdown. Instead I'd like to be able to resume / point codex at a session file for context.

The ask here is to manually opt in to transitioning from ephemeral to a non-ephemeral thread somehow. It's possible that this is available through some path already, but I didn't see it. (Asking codex to find a way to do this didn't turn up anything obvious - I resorted to letting it write out a markdown handoff doc instead).

Additional information

_No response_

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4 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 4 months ago

Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.

#19140

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myudak · 2 months ago

yeah, why cant i save the sidechat? i literally just do important work w/ that, i dont wanna lose it

gclayburg · 2 months ago

this is definitely a bug worth fxing. The way it is now, after some time its like codex is saying 'you are done reading now. go away'. Seems a bit rude to me. In general, the side chat idea seems shortsighted to me. Why not just make it a '+' button like other agents have. its just a new context window in the same worktree and/or branch that you are currently working in.

andrew05060414 · 1 month ago

Focused product proposal: keep /side ephemeral by default, but add one explicit promotion action such as /side promote or /side keep.

When the active ephemeral conversation is non-empty and promotion is still possible, closing it should require confirmation with a clear promotion option. Promotion should materialize a normal persisted fork and return a resumable conversation.

Success invariants:

a normal threads row exists for the promoted conversation;
a normal rollout path is written;
session_index.jsonl contains the promoted conversation;
the promoted conversation remains resumable after an App Server restart;
ordinary /side usage remains ephemeral unless the user explicitly promotes it.

This separates the closed-chat discoverability problem in #27716 from the live in-memory promotion path described in #22001.