Support opt-in sparse checkout when creating managed worktrees

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
48/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
git, rust
Domain
cli, tooling

Research direction

Start by tracing the managed worktree creation flow and the existing Codex configuration handling; the issue names no specific files or tests. Review how sparse checkout can be applied during creation, then verify that the setting defaults off, prompts for directories when enabled, and preserves full checkouts otherwise.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

app config enhancement performance
What variant of Codex are you using?

App

What feature would you like to see?

Please add a Codex config setting that enables sparse checkout for newly created managed worktrees.

The setting should be disabled by default. When enabled, Codex should prompt the user to select one or more repository directories before creating a new worktree, then materialize only those selected paths.

The sparse selection should be applied during creation, rather than creating a full worktree first and converting it afterward. When the setting is disabled, the current full-checkout behavior should remain unchanged.

Additional information

My GameDev repository is over 300 MB, with most of its size coming from game assets. For many Codex tasks, I only need the source-code directory and do not need textures, audio, models, or other assets.

Creating a full managed worktree is therefore unnecessarily slow and consumes significant disk space. An opt-in directory picker would make worktree-based and parallel workflows much more practical for large Game projects and monorepos.

Dominant language
Rust
Stars
125k
Forks
19.5k
Avg merge
1m
Merged PRs (30d)
1k

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