Side/secondary Codex sessions can expire or become unrecoverable despite feeling like first-class workspaces

Problem

In the Codex desktop app, side or secondary sessions can become important during collaborative work, but their lifecycle is unclear and they can expire, close, or become hard/impossible to find again.

This creates a mismatch between user expectations and product behavior:

• The side session UI feels very similar to a main session/workspace.
• Users may naturally treat it as a durable place to make decisions, continue investigation, or steer the final task direction.
• However, history/search and the main session do not appear to be fully unified with these side sessions.
• If the user is forced to open a new session, the old side session can effectively become unusable or lost.
• Important context, decisions, and task direction may end up stranded in the side session rather than preserved in the main session.

Why this matters

During real collaborative work, the main session is not always the final source of truth. Sometimes Codex or the user cannot know upfront which branch of discussion will become most important. A side session that starts as temporary exploration can become the critical thread for the final direction.

Because the frontend presents side sessions as accessible and workspace-like, users are encouraged to trust them as durable. If they are actually temporary or less persistent, that should not be something the user has to infer or manage manually.

Expected behavior

Codex should make this model safer and clearer. Possible improvements:

• Make side/secondary sessions recoverable from history/search.
• Unify side session history with the main session where appropriate.
• Clearly distinguish temporary sessions from durable sessions in the UI.
• Provide a way to promote a side session into a main session.
• Preserve or summarize important side-session context back into the main session before expiration/closure.
• Avoid making forced new-session flows invalidate or strand previous work.

Request

Please consider treating this as both a reliability issue and an information architecture/UX issue. The current behavior can cause users to lose critical collaborative context, especially when the side session becomes more important than the original main session.