Codex arbitrarily renames conversation titles, making it difficult to track multiple conversations
What version of Codex is running?
0.81.0-alpha.8
What subscription do you have?
Codex Pro
Which model were you using?
GPT 5.2
What platform is your computer?
MacOs
What terminal emulator and version are you using (if applicable)?
VSCode
What issue are you seeing?
The title of each chat is arbitrarily renamed (by the model?) when creating a chat, making it difficult to keep track of conversations.
<img width="723" height="337" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/80271e12-d703-4e7d-96e3-f93013391418" />
Previously, the chat would simply be named the first line of your message, for instance "[Refactor Styles] Identify the css styles and make them modular", so that you could label the conversation and find it again easily.
Now it renames the chat arbitrarily, e.g. "Modularize Shared CSS styles" making it easy to lose track of chats if you have multiple conversations running in parallel. Especially if the topics are related.
What steps can reproduce the bug?
Create a conversation in Codex.
What is the expected behavior?
The expected behaviour is either:
- that it keeps the first sentence of your message in the title, instead of renaming it arbitrarily.
- I understand this is the behaviour on normal chat.com, but it's difficult to manage when you have 5-6 conversations all working on similar "refactor CSS" type conversations, even if they are working on different things.
or 2: Allow users to name chats so that we can clearly label each conversation
Additional information
_No response_
10 Comments
Thanks for the input. This recent change was based on user input, so we don't consider this a bug. I'll relay your feedback to the team and see if we receive similar feedback from other users.
Thanks for clarifying.
For anyone else with this issue, you can revert to previous codex
version 0.4.60if you also find this difficult to work with.<img width="1100" height="425" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/23ab6910-56e1-4e18-b596-19ffdbaf2202" />
Related feature requests for session renaming:
+1, it was really convenient before
+1, I could have a TRACE in the title to get back to. Now all titles are auto-generated.
A way to edit the TITTLE should be added.
I think
version 0.4.58is what you want.We recently added a way to rename threads (sessions) in the CLI (via the
/renameslash command) and the new macOS desktop app (by double-clicking on the thread title). We haven't yet added a rename capability in the IDE Extension or Codex web UI, but it would make sense to add this to all Codex surfaces.@etraut-openai Hi Eric, would it be possible to implement an option to provide a tool for the model that allows it to rename the conversation arbitrarily? This could be packaged and announced as 'Dynamic Conversation Title', appending a prompting section to the context that encourages to update the title as the work evolves.
@oxysoft, you're welcome to open a feature request.
Opened the separate feature request Eric suggested here: #14044\n\nThis tracks an optional model-usable rename capability for dynamic conversation titles as the work evolves.
A bit confused about this, I am using Codex app on windows and mac. My macbook seems to name the chats intelligently. While Windows app (WSL setup) just uses the first words of the chat message.