Goal style questions disappear after restarting the client, serious error!!!!

[tutuzhu98]

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

latest

What subscription do you have?

Goal style questions disappear after restarting the client

What platform is your computer?

No response

What issue are you seeing?

Goal style questions disappear after restarting the client

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Goal style questions disappear after restarting the client

What is the expected behavior?

No response

Additional information

No response

[tutuzhu98]

The questions with targets are gone, only answers remain

[etraut-openai]

Please provide more details and repro steps. It's not clear to me what problem you're hitting or how to repro it. Which platform are you using? Which version?

[tutuzhu98]

I can add a clearer repro case.

Thanks. Here are the exact details and repro steps.

Platform:

• Windows version: 10.0.26200.8246, 25H2
• Codex App version: OpenAI.Codex 26.527.3686.0

Problem:
When I create multiple goals in the same Codex Desktop thread, only the first goal prompt is displayed in the conversation UI. Later goal prompts are missing from the visible chat history, but Codex still executes them and shows the assistant completion messages.

Repro steps:

1. Open Codex Desktop on Windows.
2. Start a new thread.
3. Create a goal with test1.
4. Let Codex complete the goal.
5. Create another goal with test2 in the same thread.
6. Let Codex complete it.
7. Create another goal with test3 in the same thread.
8. Let Codex complete it.
9. Look at the conversation history.

Actual result:

• The first goal prompt, test1, is visible as a user message bubble.
• The later goal prompts, test2 and test3, are not visible.
• The assistant messages for test2 and test3 are visible, saying the goals were completed.
• So the thread appears to have assistant responses without the corresponding user goal prompts.

Expected result:

• Every goal prompt should be visible in chronological order.
• The conversation should show test1, test2, and test3, followed by their corresponding assistant responses.

The screenshot demonstrates this: only the test1 prompt bubble is visible, while the completion messages for test2 and test3 appear below without their original prompt bubbles.

[tutuzhu98]

One more related issue: when I attach an image to a goal prompt, only the text is sent and the image is dropped, while the same image upload works correctly in a normal chat message.

[tutuzhu98]

Does Goal currently have many bugs?

[etraut-openai]

Goals do not support direct-attached images. If you want a goal to reference an image, you should refer to it as a file. Goals work by injecting a continuation prompt to keep the agent working, and you wouldn't want images to be injected every time. That would quickly fill your context window. Perhaps we should make it an error to directly attach an image when defining a goal.

I generally recommend creating a new thread for each goal. Goals are designed for very-long-running tasks.

[tutuzhu98]

Thanks, that makes sense for image attachments.

For the missing goal prompt issue, my use case is that I find Goals very useful for fixing bugs, so I often invoke multiple goals repeatedly within the same thread while working on the same codebase/context.

I understand your recommendation to create a new thread for each goal, especially for very long-running tasks. However, if multiple text-only goals are created in the same thread, the later goal prompt bubbles disappearing from the visible conversation history still feels like a UI/history persistence bug.

Even if using one thread per goal is the recommended workflow, should the app still preserve and display every text-only goal prompt that was actually submitted in that thread?

[etraut-openai]

You mentioned that you find goals very useful for fixing bugs. Do you find that using normal prompts fails to fix bugs? Most bugs should be well within the normal scope of what today's models can handle. Goals are intended for very complex multi-step problems that require many hours or days to complete. For normal, every-day tasks like bug fixes, you should be able to use a regular prompt.

When you say "goal prompt bubbles", what do you mean?

Here's what I see when I create three consecutive /goal's in a thread.

[tutuzhu98]

Firstly, the reason why I am referring to the use of bug fixing/goal is because when the context is extremely complex, bugs are often difficult to fix in one go.
Secondly, you can compare the two images below.The problem is that when I restart Codex, only the first /goal is left,I don't know if you have it too.

[etraut-openai]

OK, I'm able to repro the problem if I restart Codex. You didn't mention that in any of your previous repro steps.

[tutuzhu98]

Thanks for confirming. Just to clarify, the restart condition was the main point in the issue title and original description, but I agree my later repro steps should have repeated it explicitly.

Is this something the Codex team plans to fix, so that text-only goal prompt bubbles are persisted and shown correctly after restart?