repeatedly omitting some tasks in a list of tasks

Resolved 💬 4 comments Opened Jan 1, 2026 by g3grau Closed Jan 17, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What version of Codex is running?

0.4.56

What subscription do you have?

plus

Which model were you using?

gpt-5.1-codex-max

What platform is your computer?

Linux 6.18.0-2-default x86_64 x86_64

What issue are you seeing?

Maybe there is an issue of codex not recognizing multiple tasks or paragraphs in a prompt?
When entering a prompt in the VS code extension, I often need to address several different items without submitting the prompt prematurely.
I sometimes try to make paragraphs using shift-return, but that collapses to a simple single newline in the chat log, so it doesn't seem to make a logical break (e.g. when submitting several logs for debugging, codex should be aware when one log ends and another starts). I try to use dashes or a) b) lists, but still my impression is that sometimes things get lost.

In a sense of prokastination, an ordered list of 5 topics may result in 2 or 3 being worked on, the other ones being ignored. I can repeat the open items in followup requests and the same topics get ignored again and again. In the extreme case, after a couple of such events, codex may even answer "we can keep task xy for later". It's a bit like asking your child "please do the dish washing" :-D

Suggestion:
keep multiple blank lines (Shift-Return) visible as empty lines in the chat log
Question:
Am I supposed to structure the prompt differently to distinguish multiple topics?

What steps can reproduce the bug?

In a complex task, let it ask for multiple feedback items and provide feedback on these topics in a single prompt. On top, while debugging one problem add unrelated tasks to a list of tasks. Separate different tasks with dashes or enumerate them (makes no difference as far as I can tell). I don't have a good test case to share

What is the expected behavior?

it should address every information given in the prompt, not just the "hottest" topics.

Additional information

context window usually stays <70% as indicated in vs code

View original on GitHub ↗

4 Comments

etraut-openai contributor · 7 months ago

Please use the /feedback slash command to upload your session and post the thread ID here.

etraut-openai contributor · 7 months ago

Thanks for the bug report. We'll share the feedback with the team responsible for training our codex models. If you see other model behavior that you'd like to report, please use the /feedback command. That will provide us with additional details including logs and conversation text.

g3grau · 7 months ago

Thanks a lot! Actually, I tried to find useful passages in older chats but that turned out to be difficult. I'll try to use it more instantly the next time. Maybe another suggestion to the chat log is to mimic a dialog style?
AI: ...
User: ...
That could already help to sort some things out more easily

g3grau · 7 months ago

I just submitted 019be4d6-2c6b-7dd0-a9fd-14ee83fa6645. Not the very best case and not an extreme "let's do it later" one, but hopefully good enough :) I'll investigate if 5.2 possibly does not show this effect