Codex desktop fails to render reopened thread containing assistant-emitted git directive blocks

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

• #22977
• #22968
• #22985
• #22963

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This looks likely related to / possibly a duplicate of #22968.

One extra reproduction detail from my case: the directive-like text does not need to appear as standalone lines. I reproduced the desktop render failure when the assistant merely mentioned the strings inside a normal explanatory message, including inline code spans:

`::git-stage{cwd="P:\Codex\001_demo"}`
`::git-commit{cwd="P:\Codex\001_demo"}`

Just came here to lodge this :P (as created by codex).
I had to get claude to write some code to fix it ...now that is sad.

Additional confirmation from another Windows 10 install.

Environment:

• Windows: Microsoft Windows NT 10.0.19045.0
• Codex package version observed in install path: OpenAI.Codex_26.513.3673.0_x64
• Installed app bundle inspected: app/resources/app.asar

I can confirm the issue is not only caused by an assistant accidentally writing directive-like text. The installed Codex app bundle itself appears to contain hard-coded developer instruction text telling the assistant to emit live git app directives after stage/commit/branch/push/PR actions.

Evidence from local inspection:

• app.asar contains 6 references to the live git directive prefix.
• The bundle also contains git directive instruction strings for stage, commit, push, branch creation, and PR creation.
• These instructions are persisted into session JSONL as turn_context.developer_instructions.
• On resume/new turn, this can reintroduce the same live directive prefix into a thread even after manually repairing old assistant messages.

Observed renderer failure:

[electron-message-handler] error boundary
name=LocalConversationPage
errorMessage="invalid syntax at line 1 col 5:

1  cwd=\"C:\\Users\\<user>\\Documents\\<repo>\"
       ^"

Temporary workaround for Windows users until Codex ships a fix.

The issue seems to be caused by Codex Desktop re-parsing old local JSONL session messages that contain directive-like blocks with Windows paths, for example cwd="D:\project\repo". The thread data is still there, but the Desktop renderer crashes while rendering the history.

This PowerShell one-liner does a narrow local repair:

• scans %USERPROFILE%\.codex\sessions and %USERPROFILE%\.codex\archived_sessions
• only touches JSONL session files
• creates .bak-pathfix-<timestamp> backups before editing
• only normalizes Windows path separators inside directive attributes named cwd, cwds, or file
• converts D:\foo\bar to D:/foo/bar
• does not delete, truncate, or rewrite the conversation content otherwise

_Run from PowerShell:_

taskkill /F /IM Codex.exe 2>$null; $ts=Get-Date -Format 'yyyyMMdd-HHmmss'; $roots=@("$env:USERPROFILE\.codex\sessions","$env:USERPROFILE\.codex\archived_sessions")|?{Test-Path $_}; $rx='(?<a>\b(?:cwd|cwds|file)=\\?"?)(?<v>(?:[A-Za-z]:|\\\\)[^"\\]*(?:\\+[^"\\]*)*)(?<q>\\?")'; Get-ChildItem $roots -Recurse -File -Filter '*.jsonl' -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | % {$p=$_.FullName; $s=[IO.File]::ReadAllText($p); $n=([regex]::Matches($s,$rx)).Count; if($n -gt 0){Copy-Item $p "$p.bak-pathfix-$ts"; $s=[regex]::Replace($s,$rx,{param($m) $m.Groups['a'].Value + ($m.Groups['v'].Value -replace '\\+','/') + $m.Groups['q'].Value}); [IO.File]::WriteAllText($p,$s,[Text.UTF8Encoding]::new($false)); "fixed=$n file=$p"}}

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