Linux desktop: existing chats appear in Recents instead of their projects, with incomplete assignment migration #48641

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

26.924.22138, verified from the installed official Debian package metadata and desktop logs. The About dialog was not separately checked.

Bundled Codex backend: codex-cli 0.158.0-alpha.2.1.

What subscription do you have?

Pro

What platform is your computer?

Linux 7.0.0-34-generic x86_64 x86_64

Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS, using the official Linux desktop .deb package.

What issue are you seeing?

After installing the newer desktop version, chats that previously belonged to local projects appear under Recents instead of retaining their project grouping.

Read-only inspection before making any repairs found:

• Project definitions and project-root records still existed in the local state database.
• Legacy global state still contained explicit thread-to-project assignments and a legacy-to-server project-ID mapping.
• The inspected database's threads.project_id values were all NULL.
• The local project-migration checkpoint had projectsMigrated: true and threadAssignmentsMigrated: false, with pending assignments recorded.
• Existing conversation records and transcripts remained available. The finding was missing project organization, not established deletion of conversation content.

The following is a reduced representation of the two relevant checkpoint fields. Host keys, identifiers, lists, and unrelated fields are intentionally omitted:

{
  "projectsMigrated": true,
  "threadAssignmentsMigrated": false
}

No before-upgrade database comparison was available. Therefore, I cannot tell whether this release cleared existing database assignments or whether previously unused assignment fields were never populated by a migration. The observed result is an incomplete assignment migration and lost grouping in the UI.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

The affected installation had existing local projects with chats already assigned to them:

1. Install the newer desktop version 26.924.22138 while retaining existing local Codex state.
2. Launch the desktop app and inspect the local projects and Recents lists.
3. Observe that previously grouped chats appear under Recents rather than under their original projects.
4. Inspect the local project and thread metadata without editing it. Project definitions and legacy assignments remain present, while the current thread project fields and migration checkpoint show the state described above.

This describes the observed affected installation, not a proven clean-install reproducer. The exact migration trigger has not been isolated. A pre-repair backup was retained locally; the live installation has since been repaired, so it no longer represents the original unmodified assignment state.

Conversation/session IDs, project names, and workspace paths are omitted for privacy. Token and context-window usage are not relevant to the observed project-grouping behavior.

What is the expected behavior?

Upgrading the desktop app should preserve existing thread-to-project assignments. If project definitions are migrated to a new store, their chat assignments should also be migrated, or the app should continue displaying the preserved legacy assignments until migration completes.

Additional information

Recovery was performed only after backing up local state. Existing legacy assignments were matched to existing thread records and server-side project IDs, then restored through the local app-server's thread/metadata/update method. No new project definitions or conversation content were created by this repair. A stale legacy assignment without a matching thread record was left untouched.

Post-repair database reads confirmed the restored assignments, and SQLite quick_check returned ok. This verifies the metadata repair; it does not identify why the automatic migration was incomplete.

A separate startup/loading failure was observed during the same investigation. The available evidence does not establish that the startup failure and the project-assignment issue share a root cause.

Potentially related reports:

• [Windows][26.901.31953] All Projects disappeared after update, threads moved to Recents — incomplete project assignment migration #42867 — similar incomplete migration and NULL project assignments on Windows, with different legacy-state details.
• Bug report: Local projects disappear from sidebar after Windows desktop update #42739 — project/sidebar migration problems on Windows.

These reports may belong to the same migration problem, but the platform and surviving-state details differ. No raw logs, database files, global-state files, project inventories, identifiers, or conversation transcripts are attached.