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Codex App: improve the Subagents panel with live activity and per-agent configuration #36266
Description
What variant of Codex are you using?
App
What feature would you like to see?
Summary
The existing Subagents panel already shows which subagents were created, their status, and a brief description of their assigned work.
As GPT models make more active use of multiple subagents, I would like this panel to provide a clearer, more timely overview of how the delegated work is progressing.
Current limitation
When multiple subagents are active, the existing information is not always enough to understand the parallel workflow at a glance.
It is difficult to quickly compare:
- the current focus or latest meaningful activity of each agent
- how each delegated task is progressing
- which model and reasoning configuration each agent is using
Proposed improvements
Enhance the existing Subagents panel with:
- a concise, live activity summary for each active agent
- the current stage of work, such as exploring, reviewing, implementing, or validating
- the latest meaningful progress update and elapsed time
- each agent’s role, resolved model, and reasoning effort
- an expandable detail view containing the assigned task, visible activity history, progress updates, and final result
The goal is to make parallel execution easier to understand, rather than to require users to manually manage or control individual subagents.
This does not need to expose private chain-of-thought reasoning. Concise summaries based on user-visible operational activity would be sufficient.
Why this matters
As Codex delegates more work to subagents, the quality of the overall experience increasingly depends on making that delegation understandable.
Improved visibility would help users:
- understand how Codex divided the work
- follow multiple workstreams without opening every agent individually
- see how the overall task is progressing
- verify that the intended model and reasoning configuration was applied
- better understand and trust long-running multi-agent workflows
Additional information
Related issues
- Subagents panel no longer shows each agent’s model or reasoning effort #32283 covers per-agent model and reasoning-effort visibility, but not the broader live activity overview.
- Parallel-first subagents and nonblocking background task management #22099 and [UX/DX] Multi-agent TUI overhaul: named agents, per-agent config, async orchestration & @mention messaging #12047 explore related monitoring concepts for the CLI/TUI, while this request targets the Codex App.
Activity
github-actions commentedon Jul 31, 2026
Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.
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andrewylies commentedon Jul 31, 2026
#35915 focuses on exposing detailed command and tool activity for an active task in the Desktop app, comparable to the mobile remote view.
This issue specifically focuses on the existing Subagents panel: providing an at-a-glance view across multiple parallel subagents, including each agent’s latest meaningful activity, role, resolved model, and reasoning effort.
The two requests could share some underlying activity data, but the intended UI and multi-agent use case are distinct.
deanhiller commentedon Sep 22, 2026
Concrete reproduction supporting this request, observed with
codex-cli 0.155.1and the Desktop/App command center:0 workingand marked the parent taskReady, with no visible active child conversation.Working; after its reply, it returned toReadyeven though the child continued implementing, testing, resolving conflicts, repairing reviews, and preparing the merge.In addition to the proposed live summary, please make the parent/task-group status account for running descendants and make each active child selectable into a live, read-only transcript view containing its assigned prompt, progress messages, tool calls/results, waiting/approval state, and final handoff. Viewing the child must not interrupt or steer either thread, and completed child history should remain nested under the parent.
This does not require private chain-of-thought—only the ordinary operational conversation and tool activity already shown for a top-level task.
I initially opened #47224 for this reproduction, but closed it as a duplicate of this broader request and consolidated the useful evidence here.
deanhiller commentedon Sep 22, 2026
New concrete reproduction from the same workflow, observed with
codex-cli 0.155.1:The project task/status panel displayed a count of 5, but listed only the parent task (
Add Starter Word List menu) and four older completed top-level tasks. A reviewer subagent was actively running at that moment and was entirely absent from the list.This is especially confusing because other ordinary live agents can be selected and switched to in the GUI. The reviewer child was different: it was not merely missing activity details or marked with the wrong status—it was not present as a selectable row at all. The backend collaboration status still reported
/root/review_1095as running, and it later returned its result normally.Expected: every live descendant, including reviewer/checklist subagents, appears beneath its parent and can be selected while running. The displayed count and
Workingstate should account for those descendants.Screenshot captured while the reviewer was running: