Codex App: improve the Subagents panel with live activity and per-agent configuration
What variant of Codex are you using?
App
What feature would you like to see?
Summary
The existing Subagents panel already shows which subagents were created, their status, and a brief description of their assigned work.
As GPT models make more active use of multiple subagents, I would like this panel to provide a clearer, more timely overview of how the delegated work is progressing.
Current limitation
When multiple subagents are active, the existing information is not always enough to understand the parallel workflow at a glance.
It is difficult to quickly compare:
- the current focus or latest meaningful activity of each agent
- how each delegated task is progressing
- which model and reasoning configuration each agent is using
Proposed improvements
Enhance the existing Subagents panel with:
- a concise, live activity summary for each active agent
- the current stage of work, such as exploring, reviewing, implementing, or validating
- the latest meaningful progress update and elapsed time
- each agent’s role, resolved model, and reasoning effort
- an expandable detail view containing the assigned task, visible activity history, progress updates, and final result
The goal is to make parallel execution easier to understand, rather than to require users to manually manage or control individual subagents.
This does not need to expose private chain-of-thought reasoning. Concise summaries based on user-visible operational activity would be sufficient.
Why this matters
As Codex delegates more work to subagents, the quality of the overall experience increasingly depends on making that delegation understandable.
Improved visibility would help users:
- understand how Codex divided the work
- follow multiple workstreams without opening every agent individually
- see how the overall task is progressing
- verify that the intended model and reasoning configuration was applied
- better understand and trust long-running multi-agent workflows
Additional information
Related issues
- #32283 covers per-agent model and reasoning-effort visibility, but not the broader live activity overview.
- #22099 and #12047 explore related monitoring concepts for the CLI/TUI, while this request targets the Codex App.
2 Comments
Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.
Powered by Codex Action
https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/35915 focuses on exposing detailed command and tool activity for an active task in the Desktop app, comparable to the mobile remote view.
This issue specifically focuses on the existing Subagents panel: providing an at-a-glance view across multiple parallel subagents, including each agent’s latest meaningful activity, role, resolved model, and reasoning effort.
The two requests could share some underlying activity data, but the intended UI and multi-agent use case are distinct.