Does forking a Codex conversation preserve full context?
OpenAI Developer Community
June 30, 2026
I’m trying to understand how forking works in Codex Desktop.
I had a Codex conversation with a lot of concrete project details: source files, database paths, import rules, exclusions, and decisions we had already made.
Then I forked the conversation.
In the fork, Codex acted like it barely remembered the original thread. It missed important decisions and even invented placeholder paths that contradicted what we had already discussed.
From my side, it felt like the fork started from a very aggressive hidden summary/compaction, but I didn’t see any warning that context would be reduced.
Is that expected?
When I fork a Codex conversation, does the new thread get the full prior context, or only a compacted/summarized version of it?
If it’s summarized, I think the UI should make that clear, because in coding workflows this can lead to wrong code changes very quickly.
Discussion in the ATmosphere