## Why
Clients that display or coordinate spawned subagents need an
authoritative snapshot of a thread's immediate spawned children when
they connect to app-server or recover after missing live events.
`thread/list` cannot query by parent, so clients must otherwise scan
unrelated threads or reconstruct relationships from rollout history and
transient events.
The direct spawn relationship already exists in persisted
`thread_spawn_edges` state. Review and Guardian threads do not
participate in that lifecycle and are intentionally outside this
filter's scope.
## What changed
This adds an experimental `parentThreadId` filter to `thread/list`.
Parent-filtered requests return direct spawned children from persisted
state while preserving the existing response shape, explicit filters,
sorting, and timestamp-only cursor behavior. The lookup does not read
rollout transcripts or recursively return descendants.
Supersedes #25112 with the narrower `thread/list` filter approach.
## How it works
1. An experimental client passes a valid thread ID as `parentThreadId`.
2. App-server routes the list through the existing thread-store and
state-database boundaries.
3. SQLite selects threads whose IDs have a direct persisted spawn edge
from that parent.
4. Omitted provider and source filters include all values; explicit
filters keep ordinary `thread/list` semantics.
5. Grandchildren, Review threads, and Guardian threads are excluded.
## Verification
State (144 tests), rollout (69 tests), and focused app-server
thread-list (31 tests) suites passed. Scoped Clippy checks and
repository formatting also passed. Coverage includes direct spawned
children, omitted grandchildren, pagination, malformed IDs, mixed source
kinds, explicit filters, and operation without rollout files.
Stack split from #25708. Original PR intentionally left open. This
second PR persists multi-agent runtime metadata through thread creation,
rollout recording, and thread storage.
## Why
This PR
https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/24161#discussion_r3325692763
revealed a subagent data modeling issue, where we overloaded
`forked_from_id` to also mean `parent_thread_id`. That's incorrect since
guardian and review subagents can be a subagent and NOT fork the main
thread's history.
The solution here is to explicitly store a new `parent_thread_id` on
`SessionMeta`, alongside `forked_from_id` which already exists. While
we're at it, also expose it in the app-server protocol on the `Thread`
object.
A thread->subagent relationship and a fork of thread history are
orthogonal concepts.
## What Changed
- Added top-level `parent_thread_id` persistence on `SessionMeta` and
runtime/session plumbing through `SessionConfiguredEvent`,
`CodexSpawnArgs`, `SessionConfiguration`, `ThreadConfigSnapshot`,
`TurnContext`, and `ModelClient`.
- Made turn metadata, request headers, analytics, and subagent-start
events read the separate runtime/top-level parent field instead of
deriving general parent lineage from `SessionSource` or
`forked_from_thread_id`.
- Passed parent lineage separately at delegated subagent, review,
guardian, agent-job, and multi-agent spawn construction sites;
copied-history fork lineage remains derived only from `InitialHistory`.
- Persisted and exposed parent lineage through rollout/thread-store
projections and app-server v2 `Thread.parentThreadId`.
- Updated app-server README text and regenerated app-server schema
fixtures for the additive `parentThreadId` response field.
- make ThreadStore::update_thread_metadata accept a broad range of
metadata patches
- keep ThreadStore::append_items as raw canonical history append (no
metadata side effects)
- in the local store, write these metadata updates to a combination of
sqlite and rollout jsonl files for backwards-compat. It special cases
which fields need to go into jsonl vs sqlite vs whatever, confining the
awkwardness to just this implementation
- in remote stores we can simply persist the metadata directly to a
database, no special casing required.
- move the "implicit metadata updates triggered by appending rollout
items" from the RolloutRecorder (which is local-threadstore-specific) to
the LiveThread layer above the ThreadStore, inside of a private helper
utility called ThreadMetadataSync. LiveThread calls ThreadStore
append_items and update_metadata separately.
- Add a generic update metadata method to ThreadManager that works on
both live threads and "cold" threads
- Call that ThreadManager method from app server code, so app server
doesn't need to worry about whether the thread is live or not
## Why
Reverts #20689 to restore the previous optional state DB plumbing. The
conflict resolution keeps the newer installation ID and session/thread
identity changes that landed after #20689, while removing the mandatory
state DB and agent graph store dependency from ThreadManager
construction.
## What changed
- Restored `Option<StateDbHandle>` through app-server, MCP server,
prompt debug, and test entry points.
- Removed the `codex-core` dependency on `codex-agent-graph-store` and
reverted descendant lookup back to the existing state DB path when
available.
- Kept newer `installation_id` forwarding by passing it beside the
optional DB handle.
- Kept local thread-name updates working when the optional state DB
handle is absent.
## Validation
- `git diff --check`
- `cargo test -p codex-thread-store`
- `cargo test -p codex-state -p codex-rollout -p
codex-app-server-protocol`
- Attempted `env CARGO_INCREMENTAL=0 cargo test -p codex-core -p
codex-app-server -p codex-app-server-client -p codex-mcp-server -p
codex-thread-manager-sample -p codex-tui`; blocked locally by a rustc
ICE while compiling `v8 v146.4.0` with `rustc 1.93.0 (254b59607
2026-01-19)` on `aarch64-apple-darwin`.
## Summary
- make `thread_source` an explicit optional thread-level field on
`thread/start`, `thread/fork`, and returned thread payloads
- persist `thread_source` in rollout/session metadata so resumed live
threads retain the original value
- replace the old best-effort `session_source` -> `thread_source`
mapping with an explicit caller-supplied analytics classification
## Why
Before this change, analytics `thread_source` was populated by a
best-effort mapping from `session_source`. `session_source` describes
the runtime/client surface, not the actual thread-level origin, so that
projection was not accurate enough to distinguish cases such as `user`,
`subagent`, `memory_consolidation`, and future thread origins reliably.
Making `thread_source` explicit keeps one thread-level analytics field
while letting callers provide the real classification directly instead
of recovering it indirectly from `session_source`.
## Impact
For new analytics events, `thread_source` now reflects the explicit
thread-level classification supplied by the caller rather than an
inferred value derived from `session_source`. Existing protocol fields
remain optional; callers that omit `threadSource` now produce `null`
instead of a best-effort inferred value.
## Validation
- `just write-app-server-schema`
- `cargo test -p codex-analytics -p codex-core -p
codex-app-server-protocol --no-run`
- `cargo test -p codex-app-server-protocol
generated_ts_optional_nullable_fields_only_in_params`
- `cargo test -p codex-analytics
thread_initialized_event_serializes_expected_shape`
- `cargo test -p codex-core
resume_stopped_thread_from_rollout_preserves_thread_source`
## Why
We want the agent graph store to be passed down the stack as a real
dependency, the same way we already treat the thread store.
This will let us inject the agent graph store as a real dependency and
support implementations other than the local SQLite-backed one. Right
now most code instantiates a state DB and an agent graph store
just-in-time. Ideally, we would not depend on the state DB directly but
only read through the higher-level interfaces.
This change makes the dependency boundaries explicit and moves state DB
initialization to process bootstrap instead of hiding it inside local
store implementations.
## What changed
- `ThreadManager` now requires a `StateDbHandle` and an
`AgentGraphStore` at construction time instead of treating them as
optional internals.
- The local store constructors no longer lazily initialize SQLite.
Callers now initialize the state DB once per process and use that shared
handle to build:
- `LocalThreadStore`
- `LocalAgentGraphStore`
- App bootstraps (`app-server`, `mcp-server`, `prompt_debug`, and the
thread-manager sample) now initialize the state DB up front and inject
the resulting handle down the stack.
- `app-server` now consistently uses its process-scoped state DB handle
instead of reopening SQLite or trying to recover it from loaded threads.
- Device-key storage now reuses the shared state DB handle instead of
maintaining its own lazy opener.
- The thread archive / descendant traversal paths now use the injected
`AgentGraphStore` instead of reaching through local
thread-store-specific state.
## Verification
- `cargo check -p codex-core -p codex-thread-store -p codex-app-server
-p codex-mcp-server -p codex-thread-manager-sample --tests`
- `cargo test -p codex-thread-store`
- `cargo test -p codex-core
thread_manager_accepts_separate_agent_graph_store_and_thread_store --
--nocapture`
- `cargo test -p codex-app-server
thread_archive_archives_spawned_descendants -- --nocapture`
- Build one app-server process ThreadStore from startup config and share
it with ThreadManager and CodexMessageProcessor.
- Remove per-thread/fork store reconstruction so effective thread config
cannot switch the persistence backend.
- Add params to ThreadStore create/resume for specifying thread
metadata, since otherwise the metadata from store creation would be used
(incorrectly).
Begin migrating the thread write codepaths to ThreadStore.
This starts using ThreadStore inside of core session code, not only in
the app server code.
Rework the interfaces around thread recording/persistence. We're left
with the following:
* `ThreadManager`: owns the process-level registry of loaded threads and
handles cross-thread orchestration: start, resume, fork, lookup, remove,
and route ops to running CodexThreads.
* `CodexThread`: represents one loaded/running thread from the outside.
It is the handle app-server and callers use to submit ops, inspect
session metadata, and shut the thread down.
* `LiveThread`: session-owned persistence lifecycle handle for one
active thread. Core session code uses it to append rollout items,
materialize lazy persistence, flush, shutdown, discard init-failed
writers, and load that thread’s persisted history.
* `ThreadStore`: storage backend abstraction. It answers “how are
threads persisted, read, listed, updated, archived?” Local and remote
implementations live behind this trait.
* `LocalThreadStore`: local ThreadStore implementation. It owns the
file/sqlite-specific details and keeps RolloutRecorder as a local
implementation detail.
This is a few too many Thread abstractions for my liking, but they do
all represent different concepts / needs / layers.
Migration note: in places where the core code explicitly requires a
path, rather than a thread ID, throw an error if we're running with a
remote store.
Cover the new local live-writer lifecycle with focused tests and
preserve app-server thread-start behavior, including ephemeral pathless
sessions.
Brent Traut ·
jif-oai ·
Owen Lin ·
Tom ·
pakrym-oai ·
rhan-oai ·
Rasmus Rygaard ·