Auto-compaction silently discards all conversation history since 0.145.0

What version of Codex CLI is running?

codex-cli 0.146.0

What subscription do you have?

Pro

Which model were you using?

gpt-5.6-sol

What platform is your computer?

Linux 7.0.0-28-generic x86_64 x86_64

What terminal emulator and version are you using (if applicable)?

Ghostty, inside tmux

Codex doctor report

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}

What issue are you seeing?

Since 0.145.0, auto-compaction sometimes discards the whole conversation instead of summarizing it. The session continues but the model has no memory of it, and the next turn opens with the agent asking what to work on.

In the rollout, the compacted record's replacement_history holds only the four boot preamble messages (three developer, one user). A healthy compaction ends with an additional summary item that has no role; on a failure that item is absent.

The agent's next message was:

What would you like to work on in /path/to/project?

There is no error. The TUI reports a successful compaction and last_token_usage drops from 225,050 to 28,030, which is the preamble alone.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

No deterministic repro, since it is threshold-triggered on long sessions. I characterized it across my stored rollouts instead, counting every compacted record and treating a replacement_history of exactly [developer, developer, developer, user] as a failure. ChatGPT auth only, no custom provider:

<!-- linear:table-colwidths:266,266,266 -->
| CLI version | compactions | context lost |
| -- | -- | -- |
| 0.135.0 - 0.144.3 | 45 | 0 |
| 0.145.0 | 8 | 7 |

The first 0.145.0 compactions were healthy, then every one after 2026-07-24 19:00 UTC failed, with no version change in between. That points at a server-side component rather than the client alone.

To check your own rollouts:

find ~/.codex/sessions -name '*.jsonl' -exec jq -c \
  'select(.type=="compacted")
   | {n: (.payload.replacement_history|length),
      roles: (.payload.replacement_history|map(.role))}' {} +

Healthy rows end in null, which is the summary item. Failed rows are exactly ["developer","developer","developer","user"].

0.146.0 is absent from the table because my recent long sessions on it ran through a different model provider. The failure looks identical there, so I do not believe 0.146.0 fixes it.

What is the expected behavior?

Compaction should replace history with the preamble plus a summary. If summarization returns nothing, it should surface an error and leave history intact rather than silently discarding it.

Additional information

Two leads from strings in the 0.146.0 binary, offered as pointers rather than conclusions:

• "A new context window will start without summarizing conversation history." describes the observed outcome exactly. If a new_context path is reachable from an auto-compaction trigger, that would match.
• auto_compact_fallback_prompt and auto_compact_fallback_buffer_tokens suggest a fallback compaction path. If the primary summarization fails and the fallback yields empty output, an unconditional history replacement would produce this.

Related but distinct: openai/codex#33493 (local compaction v2, unbounded images) and openai/codex#34428 (remote compaction ignoring compact_prompt).