Codex Desktop: surface chats awaiting permission or recently completed at the top

Open 💬 2 comments Opened May 2, 2026 by jazzyalex

What variant of Codex are you using?

App

What feature would you like to see?

Codex Desktop should offer a way to bring conversations that need attention, or just finished work, to the top of the sidebar/project list so users do not have to scroll through many chats to find them.

Useful states to surface:

Chats awaiting user permission / approval.
Chats awaiting user input.
Chats that just finished successfully, shown with the existing green status indicator.
Optionally, actively running chats.

Possible UI options:

A sidebar sort/filter mode such as "Needs attention first".
A small "Active / Needs attention / Recently finished" section above normal history.
Per-project grouping that keeps these important chats visible within the project they belong to.

Why this matters

When many Codex conversations are running or have recently completed, the current sidebar can require too much scrolling to find the chat that needs action. This is especially painful for approval prompts: the user may know something is blocked, but still has to hunt for the exact conversation.

The goal is not only notifications, but better in-app workbench visibility: chats whose state changed should become easy to find immediately.

Related issues

This overlaps with, but is not the same as:

openai/codex#18778, which asks for active running tabs on top.
openai/codex#18162, which asks for "Action Required" in terminal/tab title for TUI.
openai/codex#13629, which asked for an app dock badge count for awaiting approvals.

Those are useful related ideas, but this request is specifically about Codex Desktop sidebar/project-list ordering and visibility.

Prior-art example

In my AgentSessions app, the Agent Cockpit gives a visual workbench view of active sessions and their state, so sessions that need attention or recently completed work are easy to spot without manually scrolling through history.

Product page:

[https://jazzyalex.github.io/agent-sessions](<https://jazzyalex.github.io/agent-sessions>)

Repo:

[https://github.com/jazzyalex/agent-sessions](<https://github.com/jazzyalex/agent-sessions>)

AgentSessions is a macOS, open-source app with 522 GitHub stars. A similar state-aware surfacing option in Codex Desktop would make parallel agent work much easier to manage.

View original on GitHub ↗

2 Comments

apws · 3 months ago

in addition to gray/nonaccent (invisible) progress-circles and dark green notification texts on agents would be great to see some bright visual indicators (narrow horizontal led bars) using regular led-accent colors as bright green/red to show active agents progress (green) and wait (red) on some kind of BOTTOM placed status-line (I mean just under main chat pane), allowing to show at least some count of such narrow bars (say 10) but showing bright/visible accent colors (those led green/red ...) - may be having those red/waiting sorted from left (the same as in left pane to have tasks on top) ... because, once I saw (also gray/invisible regular text color Working ... TIME scrolling away in chat pane - expecting counting for minutes(! nonsense, invisible, away) then that bottom status-line with fixed position can be better for those "leds" ... my2c;

tristan666666 · 2 months ago

+1 on "not only notifications, but better workbench visibility." I hit this as soon as I had multiple Claude/Codex runs open.

The small state model that has been useful for me is:

running
awaiting user input / approval
stuck or interrupted
recently finished

I made a small macOS companion around that idea: Agent Island surfaces Claude/Codex states in the MacBook notch, and can auto-resume a selected long run when it can continue.

https://github.com/tristan666666/agent-island

Native Codex sidebar sorting/filtering would still be the right long-term home for this, but the external status layer has been useful in the meantime.