Can't fork a side chat & side chats break after a period of inactivity.

Open 💬 6 comments Opened May 4, 2026 by joshp123

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

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

Version 26.429.30905 (2345)

What subscription do you have?

pro

What platform is your computer?

_No response_

What issue are you seeing?

Open a side chat with /side. Hit fork. get error message: "Failed to fork chat'

Also, if you don't use the side chat for a while, it breaks, you get a message along the lines of chat could not be found.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Uploaded thread: 019ded3d-4c9b-7f02-9ba8-f1ace9a105d3

What is the expected behavior?

_No response_

Additional information

_No response_

View original on GitHub ↗

6 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 3 months ago

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

#20944

Powered by Codex Action

joshp123 · 3 months ago

Relates to the linked issue but isn't _quite_ a direct duplicate. In that issue, forking fails after some time - in this issue, forking fails immediately. The underlying mechanism is probably the same, though. As a user, you'd want your side chats to be ephemeral enough to throw them away, but not-ephemeral enough for them to still be there when you come back after a while, and also to be able to "promote" them to a real chat. (Although, promoting to a real chat is less important if the chats don't break after a certain period of time).

GP2P · 3 months ago

I am seeing the same side-chat fork failure on macOS as well.

Environment:

Codex Desktop for macOS 26.506.31421 (2620)
Darwin 25.3.0 arm64

Observed behavior:

Open an existing Codex Desktop conversation.
Start a side chat from that conversation.
Use the Fork action from the side chat.
The app shows a Failed to fork chat toast instead of creating the fork.

This looks like the same failure mode described here, still present in a newer macOS build than the original report. I am not attaching logs or thread IDs here because they may include private project/thread context, but I can collect specific non-sensitive diagnostics if maintainers want them.

robertoecf · 3 months ago

Same problem here, uploaded a feedback with session logs:
019e65a1-b355-7811-bc3a-f058a3ddb9f9

jimmygchen · 23 days ago

I’m seeing this when using Remote Control.

I can open a side chat and use it normally. If the remote connection drops, the side chat is gone when I reconnect. The main chat is still there.

I understand that side chats are currently ephemeral, but losing one after a brief connection drop is pretty surprising. AFAIK there’s no warning that reconnecting can discard it.

It would be good to either keep the side chat across reconnects or make this limitation clear before opening one.

ChatGPT: 26.727.51351 on macOS
Remote host: Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, x86-64
Codex CLI: 0.146.0

TyceHerrman · 16 days ago

This issue now seems to overlap with two more narrowly scoped reports:

#22001 covers the side-chat Fork failure in detail, including the missing persisted thread/rollout state and no rollout found failure.
#25233 covers side chats becoming unusable after inactivity / expiring unexpectedly.

Since this issue contains both of those symptoms, it may now be useful to treat #22001 and #25233 as the more specific trackers and close this as superseded/duplicate

Keeping the two symptoms separate should also make resolution clearer, since fixing side-chat expiration does not necessarily fix promotion/forking, and vice versa.