ability to ask or asign multiple parallel work inside a single chat session
Resolved 💬 4 comments Opened May 13, 2026 by goyalayus Closed May 13, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, 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?
When I am doing work in a session, I sometimes want it to do multiple things, or maybe when it's working, I want to ask a question.
And I want these things to happen simultaneously instantly.
Subagents can't be used here because they will need to be assigned by the main agent. (also idk if they get the whole chat context anyway)
So we want multiple main-agnets in a single chat
Additional information
_No response_
4 Comments
Here are some existing features that you may not be aware of that may (at least partly) meet your needs:
/sidefeature that allows you to create a temporary ephemeral "side chat". It's great for asking quick questions while the main agent thread continues.It's unlikely that we will support multiple agents in a single chat. That would violate deeply-embedded assumptions at every level of our stack from the model to the harness to the UI.
side looks interesting.
will check it out.
the steer thing is still sequential so not helpful
Another option: use
/forkto create another thread from the first. If you're using the CLI (TUI), you'll need to do this in a fresh terminal if you want both threads to work concurrently.Yeah, I thought of that.
But then I want the context of the second chat in the original chat. so
that would not be possible.
On Thu, May 14, 2026 at 4:23 AM Eric Traut @.***> wrote: