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Make side chats recoverable after deletion or closure #34752

Description

@Jason-Wang313

What problem are you seeing?

Side chats currently feel like temporary scratchpads. If a side chat is deleted, closed, or otherwise lost, there does not appear to be an obvious way to recover or retrieve its contents later.

This is risky because side chats can contain useful research notes, debugging context, decisions, or lightweight handoff material. Users may assume the side chat is part of the same durable task history as normal Codex tasks, then later discover that important content is gone.

Desired behavior

Side chats should have a clear recoverability story. For example, one or more of:

  • Deleted side chats can be restored from a trash/archive area.
  • Side chats can be explicitly saved or promoted into normal task history.
  • Side chats can be exported before deletion.
  • The UI warns users before deleting a side chat if it will be unrecoverable.
  • Side chats are included in a parent task's durable history or checkpoint in a discoverable way.

Why this matters

The side-chat feature is useful for exploratory work, but exploration often produces durable decisions. Without a recovery path, users need to manually copy summaries into files or the main task to avoid losing work.

Environment

Codex desktop app, side conversation / side chat workflow.

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    appIssues related to the Codex desktop appenhancementNew feature or requestsessionIssues involving session (thread) management, resuming, forking, naming, archiving

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