The issue with Codex not being able to compact the context has been going on for ten days now.
What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?
OpenAI.Codex: 26.527.3686.0
What subscription do you have?
Pro
What platform is your computer?
win 10 pro x64
What issue are you seeing?
Codex reaches automatic context compaction and then keeps doing it forever.
What steps can reproduce the bug?
Regular use is enough. It doesn’t have to involve screenshots or anything else. You just wait until the chat fills up with context, and with 250k tokens that can happen quickly, and that’s it - the chat is dead. You can close it and open a new one. In short, Codex is impossible to use. You get about 5 minutes of work with a chat. By the time you explain to the agent what needs to be done, it stops working.
What is the expected behavior?
So that I can actually use the product I paid for. I bought a subscription, and half the time I just sit there looking at it because it is impossible to use. I would like automatic context compaction to finish instead of running forever.
Additional information
I know that similar topics have already been raised, but not about the new update. I want to show that the issue is still relevant and that it is more important than all the other ones, like “I can’t see where my context is now.”
Forget the inconvenience - the tool itself is basically dead here.
6 Comments
Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.
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The issue has been resolved, so this can be considered closed. Thanks for the fix.
I am experiencing the same issue on Codex Desktop for macOS with a ChatGPT Pro subscription.
“Context automatically compacted” repeats continuously in the same task. Codex stops making progress, the app becomes unresponsive, and the entire Mac slows down severely. I have to force-quit the application.
Selecting “Continue in a new task” does not resolve it—the new task inherits the same compaction behavior and becomes unusable.
This occurred on July 29, 2026. I have submitted logs through /feedback and reported the issue to OpenAI Support.