Auto-Compaction during /goal loses goal and goes back to chase recent prompts
Open 💬 1 comment Opened Jul 8, 2026 by tnorman42
What version of Codex CLI is running?
codex-cli 0.143.0
What subscription do you have?
PRO
Which model were you using?
gpt-5.5
What platform is your computer?
Darwin 25.5.0 arm64 arm
What terminal emulator and version are you using (if applicable)?
MacOS Terminal
Codex doctor report
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}What issue are you seeing?
If you have a long-running /goal set, after it does it's auto-compaction, it becomes confused and loses track of the goal in favor of the previously-sent prompts.
100% repro for me over the past several days.
As an example, screenshot of a session below. I had previously prompted it to clean up sections 26, 21, 18, 17, 4 of a document. Then I did /compact after it had finished. Then I started a /goal. After coming back to the machine after several hours, I saw that it was trying to remember what 26, 21, 18, 17, 4 referred to. When I asked it what it was doing, it said:
• I was referring to the numbers in your last message:
26, 21, 18, 17, 4
I treated those as references to the numbered items from the earlier REQUEST_BACKLOG.md audit. “Approved” was my bad word choice; you weren’t approving
anything, you were giving instructions on how to handle each numbered concern.
What happened: after compaction, the current backlog had already been pruned, so some of those old item numbers no longer existed in the live file. I started
looking through git history to map your numbers back to the older backlog items before editing anything.
No backlog wording edits were made after that. The only completed action was committing and pushing the already-staged FrancoGene work as 773987a42.
I should have said: “I’m mapping the numbered directions from your last message to the current backlog/history,” not “items you approved.”These numbers haven't been mentioned or used for hours.
Screenshot: <img width="949" height="1011" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/00a39cda-6188-4c30-b172-c1336970f49b" />
What steps can reproduce the bug?
100% repro for me. The only way I can avoid it is by doing /clear and starting the /goal without any previous context / prompts.
- Make a few prompts.
- Start a /goal that lasts through an auto-compaction.
- After the auto-compact, it will start to talk about the previous prompts, losing track of the goal. Sometimes it goes for minutes, burning tons of tokens, before it gives up and looks at the goal.
What is the expected behavior?
Stay on goal!
Additional information
_No response_
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