Codex Desktop 26.818.41509: task titles remain visible but conversations render blank until Session Storage reset

What version of the Codex App are you using?

• Codex Desktop: 26.818.41509
• Bundled Codex CLI: 0.149.0-alpha.4.1

What platform is your computer?

• macOS 26.5 (build 25F71)
• Apple Silicon (MacBook Air, M4)

What issue are you seeing?

Existing task titles remained visible in the Codex Desktop sidebar, but selecting affected tasks opened an empty task pane instead of the saved conversation. The task data was not lost.

During the same incident:

• Turning off Computer History returned an error.
• A queued task message failed to send and did not persist.
• New messages in the active troubleshooting task continued to work.

This appears to be a persisted renderer/session-state failure affecting task-view hydration and some UI-to-service actions, not a rollout, SQLite, authentication, or app-server failure.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

I do not yet have a deterministic trigger. The observed sequence was:

1. An existing task completed normally.
2. The Mac was left unattended.
3. Codex later logged an orderly shutdown with no active turn.
4. After the unattended/power-state window, Codex displayed Oops, an error has occurred.
5. Quitting and reopening Codex did not resolve the problem.
6. Task titles remained visible, but affected tasks opened blank.
7. Fully quitting Codex, moving only ~/Library/Application Support/Codex/Default/Session Storage aside, and reopening the app restored the task conversations immediately.

A system boot was recorded shortly after the first visible error, so sleep/wake, shutdown, reboot, or session restoration may be relevant. The exact trigger is not established.

What is the expected behavior?

• Existing tasks should hydrate reliably after sleep, wake, shutdown, and restart.
• Invalid persisted renderer session state should be recovered or rebuilt automatically.
• A task-view hydration failure should not also break unrelated controls such as Computer History or queued-message submission.
• The UI should expose a useful recovery/error path instead of displaying an empty task pane.

What is the actual behavior?

• Sidebar titles remained present.
• Selecting affected tasks displayed a blank pane.
• Normal app restarts reused the bad state and did not recover.
• Resetting only Default/Session Storage restored conversation rendering.

Diagnostic evidence

While the visible task panes were blank:

• Affected rollout JSONL files were present, valid, and readable.
• Local state/history SQLite databases passed integrity checks and contained the expected indexed turns/items.
• The internal thread reader returned complete missing conversations.
• The app server resumed the affected rollouts with zero parse errors.
• Authentication and the remote-control connection were healthy.
• No Codex, ChatGPT, or Electron macOS .ips / .crash report was created.
• Resetting broader legacy renderer-cache directories did not change the symptom.
• Moving only the active Default/Session Storage directory and restarting did resolve it.
• The app created a fresh, smaller session store after recovery.
• No conversation data or databases were deleted or restored from backup.
• The issue has not recurred since the targeted reset.

Correlation identifiers were provided privately to OpenAI Support and are intentionally omitted here. No conversation content, project details, account information, raw logs, or personal filesystem paths are included.

Related issues and distinction

• #27847 also reports local sessions returning after renderer cache removal, but that report was closed as a duplicate of a thread/list / sidebar-empty issue. In this incident, task titles were still listed and the internal thread reader returned their full content.
• #25354 reports Profile/Usage becoming unavailable until local UI state is cleared, which may share a renderer-state failure mode but affects different surfaces.
• #31995 reports truncated long conversations while rollout history remains local. Here, affected task panes were completely blank and unrelated UI actions failed during the same incident.