Hi everyone,
after working with Codex on larger long-running projects, I noticed a major workflow issue that becomes very painful during real creative and development work.
The problem is not the model quality.
The problem is project continuity when the context window becomes full.
Right now, once the context is exhausted:
- the conversation can suddenly stop
- compacting may fail
- forking may no longer work properly
- continuing the same project becomes difficult
- important thinking context can become fragmented
As a user, I expected the system to help guide this transition much earlier and more clearly.
What feels missing is a proper “project continuity” workflow.
For example:
- automatic or assisted project snapshots
- selective context cleanup
- “continue project” transition flow
- project-level persistence separate from raw chat context
- graceful context compression before hard failure
- lightweight project memory/state transfer between threads
The current system feels very conversation-based, while many real workflows are actually long-running thinking and development spaces.
This becomes especially important for:
- creative work
- architecture/design thinking
- research workflows
- iterative development
- long-term collaboration with Codex
I think Codex could become dramatically more usable if project continuity and context transitions were treated as a first-class UX problem, not only as a token limit issue.
I’m sharing this because I believe many users working on larger projects will eventually hit the same wall.
Would love to hear how others currently manage long-running Codex projects and context transitions.