[app] Reopening Codex restores completed subagents as unread and memory usage spikes

Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.

• #37563
• #37042
• #37041
• #37729
• #37453

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Reproduced again on Codex Desktop 26.803.61601 on macOS 26.4 arm64, with stronger lifecycle evidence.

After resuming one long-running parent thread:

• local persisted state contained 270 child edges for that parent, and every edge was still recorded as open;
• the corresponding child rollouts ended with:
• 255 × task_complete
• 13 × turn_aborted
• 2 × other response items, both stale for multiple days;
• sampled children whose rollout ended in an explicit task_complete were still represented by an open spawn edge and appeared as running in the app;
• during thread/resume, the app logged this warning three times from apply_rollout_reconstruction:

``text
ignored world-state patch without a full snapshot
``
The resumed rollout contained 67,417 items.

This narrows the symptom: completed or aborted child turns are persisted/restored as open spawn edges. The reconstruction warning may be related, but I cannot prove causality from local evidence alone.

Additional lifecycle evidence from the parent rollout:

• 330 spawn_agent calls;
• 0 close_agent calls;
• the current Desktop collaboration tool surface does not expose a close_agent action.

This means completed child handles can accumulate with no available close path. Even if open is intended to mean reusable or addressable rather than executing, rendering those terminal children as running after resume is misleading. Automatic reconciliation against task_complete / turn_aborted, or an exposed close action, would prevent the accumulation.

I could not inspect OS process state because macOS denied ps, so this update does not claim that 270 model processes are actually alive. It confirms a persisted lifecycle/UI state mismatch: explicit child terminal events coexist with open child edges after resume.

Expected reconciliation on resume:

1. replay or recover the latest valid world-state snapshot;
2. reconcile each child edge against terminal rollout events;
3. do not render task_complete or turn_aborted children as running;
4. keep completed child history available without restoring it as active work.

Additional reproduction on Codex Desktop 26.803.61601 (build 6396) on macOS, from the same long-running parent thread.

This time the UI reported 246 open subagents, but the live collaboration tree contained only the root plus one completed reviewer. The persisted parent state contained 271 direct spawn edges:

• 270 edges already recorded as closed;
• 1 edge still recorded as open: child 019ff46e-aa0b-7740-870d-8bc157e1d4b8.

That child rollout ended with an explicit task_complete event at 2026-08-12T05:46:06.952Z, yet the corresponding spawn edge remained open. Calling the available interrupt action returned previous_status=completed but did not reconcile the persisted edge.

I created a SQLite backup and changed only that exact edge from open to closed. Post-write checks showed:

• PRAGMA integrity_check = ok;
• 271 closed;
• 0 open for the parent.

This provides two distinct client symptoms:

1. the displayed 246 open count does not match persisted edge status (1 open) or the live runtime tree (0 running children);
2. an explicit task_complete child can remain persisted as open, and the exposed interrupt action does not close/reconcile it.

No child history was deleted. This looks like both a lifecycle-reconciliation defect and a UI count/rehydration defect. The resume path should reconcile terminal rollout events before computing or rendering the open/running SubAgent count.

Correction/addendum to my previous comment: the 271 closed / 0 open result described the parent's direct spawn edges after repair. A recursive traversal then found 3 additional open nested edges at depth 2. Their child rollouts ended in terminal events (1 × task_complete, 2 × turn_aborted). After closing those three exact edges, the recursive tree now reports:

• 274 closed child edges across depths 1–2;
• 0 open descendants;
• PRAGMA integrity_check = ok.

The app had displayed 246 open SubAgents even though the repaired recursive persisted tree is 274 closed / 0 open. This strengthens the UI count-cache/rehydration mismatch: the visible number is neither the direct edge count nor the recursive persisted-open count.