Automations need a silent-success mode to avoid flooding long-lived projects with threads

What issue are you seeing?

In a long-lived Codex desktop project, every scheduled automation run creates a visible thread/session, even when the run succeeds and there is nothing useful to report.

My project has four routine runs per day:

• one daily content-generation automation
• three daily review/status scans

This creates four low-value threads every day. Over time, the project timeline becomes dominated by automation runs, making important human conversations difficult to find.

Changing the automation prompt to return only a one-line success message reduces the content, but it does not prevent the thread from being created. A successful no-op scan still creates a new visible session.

Expected behavior

Automations should support configurable notification and thread-creation policies, such as:

1. Only on failure or matching condition: create a visible thread only when the run fails or a configured condition is met.
2. Silent success: record successful runs in an automation run log without creating a project thread.
3. Always notify: preserve the current behavior.
4. Optionally, show automation runs in a separate log/history view rather than mixing them with human project conversations.
5. Allow automatic hiding, collapsing, or archiving of routine automation-created threads.

Actual behavior

Every automation execution creates a visible project thread regardless of whether it succeeds, fails, changes anything, or has useful output.

Why this matters

Scheduled automations are especially useful for long-running projects, but those are also the projects most harmed by accumulating multiple routine sessions every day. The current behavior makes automation and conversation history compete for the same timeline.

Workaround

The only effective workaround is to move the schedule outside Codex, run it as an operating-system background task, write results to a local table/log, and disable the Codex automation. This loses the convenience of managing the schedule inside Codex.

Suggested solution

Add a notification policy to automation settings:

• Always create thread
• Create thread only on failure
• Create thread only when output/changes exist
• Never create thread; log run only

Also provide a dedicated automation run-history view for inspecting normal and failed runs.