Codex Desktop sidebar project groups only show threads from the first recent page; expanding a project does not load remaining project threads

Open 💬 3 comments Opened May 21, 2026 by laolin5564

Environment

  • Codex Desktop macOS app: 26.513.31313 (2867)
  • Bundled codex: codex-cli 0.131.0-alpha.9
  • macOS: 26.4.1
  • Arch: arm64

Problem

The local sessions were not lost, but the Codex Desktop sidebar only displayed a small subset of threads under each project. Expanding a project did not load the rest of that project's sessions.

This made it look like historical sessions had disappeared, even though they were still present locally and could be returned by the app server with pagination.

Observed behavior

  • Active session data still existed in ~/.codex/state_5.sqlite and ~/.codex/sessions.
  • Direct app-server pagination returned 183 threads across 13 workspace roots.
  • The sidebar initially appeared to show only about 5-6 threads per project.
  • Project "Show more" only expanded already-loaded thread keys; it did not request additional pages.

Expected behavior

When a project is expanded, Codex Desktop should either:

  • load all remaining threads for that project, or
  • continue paginating recent threads until the expanded project has all available sessions, or
  • clearly expose a global load-more mechanism before project-level truncation.

Evidence

  • thread/list with pagination returned pages [100, 83], total 183 unique threads.
  • Workspace counts included:
  • /Users/laolin/Desktop/linyn-kf: 41
  • /Users/laolin/Desktop/linyn-kf-qkl-refactor: 54
  • /Users/laolin/Desktop: 41
  • plus 10 other roots
  • The issue appears related to the desktop sidebar loading only the first recent conversation page, while project expand/collapse operates only on the loaded subset.

Impact

Users may believe historical Codex sessions were lost, even though the session data is still present locally.

Notes

I searched existing issues first. There are related sidebar/thread-list issues, but I did not find one specifically describing project groups being truncated because only the first recent page is loaded and project-level "Show more" does not trigger additional pagination.

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