Codex gets stuck on "Thinking" after an hour of persue goal.

Resolved 💬 6 comments Opened May 26, 2026 by ExecSam Closed May 28, 2026
💡 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 26.519.41501 (3044)

What subscription do you have?

ChatGPT Plus

What platform is your computer?

Darwin 25.5.0 arm64 arm

What issue are you seeing?

I decided to try out the new Codex Persue Goal mode today, and at first I experienced an issue where it failed to set goal, but I resolved that by adding goals = true to config.toml.

Anyway, the issue that I've experienced three times now is that when you use the Persue Goal mode, it sets tasks and works through them chronologically, but eventually, it gets stuck on Thinking (reasoning).

The trouble is though, from what I can inspect, the model isn't doing anything. I left it for 30 minutes and came back to the exact same screen, no progression.

The way I managed to wake it back up was to pause the goal, kill the agent, and then resume the goal, but the problem is that because it was ended prematurely (as you have to stop the agent and then restart), it forgets that it's already actioned a part of the to-do list, and starts from the first task again, even though it's already worked on it.

Usually if it's thinking, you can click on Thinking and see it's activity, but the Thinking text wasn't clickable in this case.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Provide the model with a fairly large prompt with multiple tasks relating to refactoring a Swift/SwiftUI app.

The prompt I used was as follows:

You've got some serious debugging to do.

The changes you made are definitely a step in the right direction, but there are a lot of issues still, and some things are even completely disfunctional.

The first thing I want you to look at is the hero and the rows. When you go down to the rows, and for example lets say row 2, the hero disappears! It's meant to remain in place, and essentially it should be on top of the rows, so that rows that have been scrolled past give the animation of moving up and behind the hero/featured poster, and then they just disappear after that until the user scrolls up again. THE HERO MUST STAY IN PLACE AT ALL TIMES, with only a few circumstances where it isn't.

The category title also overlaps other text for the focused row. Needs fixing.

Then, there's the category select sidebar. It doesn't even open. Like come on mate, you're better than this. It needs to open smoothly and close smoothly. When opened it pushes the rows over to allow space, just like the screenshot i provided you.

Now, you did do an alright job with the featured poster taking up the whole background with a fade to black in some areas, but the fade to black up the top looks terrible as you can see where the fade starts with a straight line as shown in the attached image.

Also, posters don't need movie titles underneath for the ones in the rows, as the posters contain the titles, so you can get rid of them for Movies and Series tabs.

Please just refer back to what I asked for, make use of as many agents as you need to, debug all bugs including scrolling through rows, entering sidebar, exiting sidebar gracefully, etc.

I want a beautiful working app. Also, let's add the gostream logo (not word logo just the logo) to the top left of the app on tvOS.

I've enabled persue goal mode, so be relentless and get it done.

What is the expected behavior?

... for the model to persue the goal and complete it without getting stuck

Additional information

This was working on a local workspace, not remote/cloud. The project is initialised with git and has several commits to a private repo.

View original on GitHub ↗

6 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 1 month ago

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

  • #24287
  • #23292
  • #23700
  • #24571

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MisterRound · 1 month ago

Very widespread at this point, see my issue: github.com/openai/codex/issues/24260

etraut-openai contributor · 1 month ago

If you are still seeing this issue (or see similar issues in the future), please use /feedback and include the session ID.

OverHash · 1 month ago
If you are still seeing this issue (or see similar issues in the future), please use /feedback and include the session ID.

Hi! The OpenCode team has been hunting this problem down for a while now. I think they have passed some session IDs along to some folks at OpenAI, but here's one: 019e68f5-1b2f-71d0-bc68-e57d9bdb0f85

Nikit0s36 · 1 month ago

019e6935-846f-7402-a8ad-7973d2e54db2

ExecSam · 1 month ago

Understood - this issue is related to #24287

Closed.