Codex CLI and agent sessions flood the desktop app sidebar with no way to scope them

Running Codex CLI at volume makes the unified desktop app’s sidebar hard to use. Every CLI session and automated agent run gets its own entry in Recents — including subagent and companion-task runs I never opened interactively — so the list fills with machine-generated sessions and there’s no way to narrow it back down.

Two parts, one bug-shaped and one feature-shaped.

Bug: the workspace dropdown doesn’t scope Recents

With “ChatGPT” selected in the top-left dropdown, Recents still lists Codex CLI sessions and “Codex Companion Task” agent runs. If that dropdown scopes the workspace, Recents should follow it; currently it appears to ignore the selection. The web sidebar doesn’t list these sessions at all, so the distinction exists — the desktop app just isn’t applying it.

Environment: ChatGPT desktop app for macOS (unified app, post-July 9 release), Pro account, heavy Codex CLI use.

Feature request: provenance filters for Codex sessions

Codex produces three fairly different kinds of session, and being able to filter them apart would help a lot:

  1. Interactive Codex sessions started in the app
  2. Codex CLI sessions
  3. Automated agent/subagent runs spawned by a CLI task

Right now all three are flattened into one undifferentiated Recents list. A filter, a grouping, or a per-row origin indicator would make the sidebar navigable again — especially if category 3 could be collapsed or hidden by default, since those are byproducts of a task rather than sessions anyone needs to reopen.

A single CLI task can produce a dozen or more entries, so the more Codex work you do, the harder your own interactive Codex sessions become to find. The app already tracks each session’s origin, so this looks like a filtering affordance rather than new infrastructure.

Thanks for considering it.

Hi, and welcome to the developer community.

You are reviewing the codex sessions?
That’s interesting. What are you using that info for?