Remote Control sidebar does not discover projectless tasks from another Mac

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
42/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
rust
Domain
desktop, distributed-systems

Research direction

Start at the task aggregation backend and desktop sidebar enumeration path, comparing how local projectless tasks differ from remote projectless tasks. Verify behavior using the paired Mac setup and direct thread navigation described in the issue; done means unarchived remote projectless tasks appear in a browsable sidebar section with title, status, and recency.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

app enhancement remote session

Summary

Mac-to-Mac Remote Control connectivity works, but the desktop sidebar does not enumerate projectless tasks from the other Mac. This makes existing remote tasks effectively undiscoverable.

Setup

  • Two Macs paired for reciprocal Remote Control
  • Codex/ChatGPT desktop app: 26.715.21425
  • Bundled CLI: 0.145.0-alpha.18
  • The affected tasks are normal, unarchived, projectless tasks with Codex-generated per-task working directories

Observed behavior

On Mac A, the task aggregation backend can enumerate and read a projectless task from Mac B, and direct navigation to its thread ID succeeds. However, the Mac A desktop sidebar never lists that Mac B task.

The behavior is symmetric: Mac B does not list three projectless tasks from Mac A. The sidebar only shows local projectless tasks and explicitly saved remote projects.

Expected behavior

When controlling another Mac, the sidebar should enumerate all unarchived remote projectless tasks, grouped by remote host, with at least title, status, and recency. A browsable Remote tasks section would also solve the problem.

Why current workarounds are insufficient

  • Search is not a discovery mechanism: users cannot search for tasks whose titles they do not know.
  • Projectless tasks use different automatically generated working directories, so adding every directory as a saved project is impractical.
  • Adding a parent project does not reliably aggregate tasks whose stored cwd is a different exact path.

Impact

Although transport, backend list/read, and direct navigation work, Mac-to-Mac Remote Control cannot reliably discover or continue existing projectless tasks.

Feedback reference

Codex feedback thread ID: 019f6e66-7344-7bd1-b54c-aaa3f3294879

Dominant language
Rust
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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