So I did a silly thing without thinking and deleted a local branch I spent 2 days working (never published) on with rm -rf 
I tried everything from vs code history restore, entries.json etc and nothing, then I thought maybe codex could help. It asked me for past commit hashes that I did not have anymore but then I thought I still have the commit hashes of the previous sessions in codex. (i use atomic commits). This is the part that blew my mind, it ran for over 80mins 
and restored the branch to a working state that I can now restore further!
I am honestly not sure if I would have been able to do that myself and I am truly astounded that codex gpt-5.2 xhigh did this. Not trying to hype but I am really impressed by this.
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How was it replied to, through the history of the conversation? This makes me uneasy.
Codex asked me for any commit hashes even deleted ones. So I looked in previous codex session history where it made the commit hashes and copied those over and I gave it full access to my files. Codex then proceed to do the automated reconstruction of the data that was still present and explicitly accessible to it, no magic but it would have required me to have extreme patience to go through all those old hashes and logs reconstructing them and then fitting them together. I weighed it up and made the call, the files were gone any way so if it could not get it back to useable who cares then id have to rebuild it from scratch again.
I did not keep an eye on every output but I wondered wether it could look at the diffs from previous codex sessions as a sort of audit trail?