Codex Desktop silently loses queued follow-up messages after restart
What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?
Codex Desktop 26.707.62119 (5211), with bundled codex-cli 0.144.2.
What subscription do you have?
Not specified.
What platform is your computer?
macOS 26.5.2 (25F84), Apple Silicon (arm64).
What issue are you seeing?
When Codex is processing an active turn, additional questions can be accepted into the waiting/queued follow-up list. If Codex Desktop is quit and restarted before those queued questions are processed, the queued entries disappear.
After reopening the same thread, the questions are not present in the queue or transcript and are never processed. This has caused several user questions to be silently lost at once.
The behavior suggests that unprocessed queued follow-ups may only exist in renderer/process memory rather than being durably associated with the thread. That is an inference from the observed restart boundary, not a confirmed root cause.
What steps can reproduce the bug?
- Start a Codex Desktop turn that remains active for long enough to accept follow-ups.
- While Codex is still working, submit several additional questions or instructions.
- Confirm that the UI shows them in the waiting/queued state and that they have not yet been processed.
- Quit and relaunch Codex Desktop before the active turn consumes the queued messages.
- Reopen the same thread.
- Observe that the queued messages are gone, do not appear in the transcript, and are never processed.
What is the expected behavior?
Once the UI accepts a queued follow-up, it should be persisted durably with the thread and restored in the original order after an app restart. Codex should then continue processing it when appropriate.
If queued messages intentionally cannot survive restart, the app should clearly warn the user before quitting and provide a way to copy or recover them. Accepted input should not disappear silently.
Additional information
No error or data-loss warning is shown.
Related but not exact duplicates:
- #26683 reports queued messages disappearing or remaining stuck in the VS Code extension. This report is specifically about Codex Desktop on macOS and the restart boundary clearing still-unprocessed queued input.
- #26413 reports VS Code queued follow-ups remaining persisted after restart but no longer processing. In this report, the queued entries themselves disappear.
- #16599 concerns already-recorded thread and subagent history being lost after restart. This report concerns accepted but not-yet-processed queued follow-ups that never become transcript entries.