OpenAI's Codex lead Tibo says Day 14 lets users edit earlier messages within a thread in the desktop app

Context

This is a first hand announcement from Tibo, who leads Codex at OpenAI, as part of his numbered daily updates. He did not name the app, publish release notes or say which plans get the feature.

Deep dive

On the evening of October 18, Tibo posted Day 14 of his daily updates: a small quality of life improvement. You can now edit previous messages within a thread in the desktop app. He added that it was long requested and took way too long to get out.

He did not say which desktop app he meant, though his numbered updates have covered Codex and ChatGPT Work. Day 12 brought more effective usage in Codex and Work through context reuse and caching, and Day 13 was another reset of Codex usage limits.

The request is a long standing one. In April, a user opened an issue on the Codex GitHub repository asking to edit any message in the desktop app, not just the last one, saying forking a conversation to change an earlier message clutters the sidebar and that editing is supported in pretty much all coding agents. Other users on Windows and Mac agreed in the comments. OpenAI's public changelog had not listed the change by the time of his post.

Tibo did not explain what happens to the later part of a thread when an earlier message is edited, for example whether the agent's following turns are replaced or kept as a branch. The post drew more than 1,000 replies and passed 200,000 views.

What to expect next

Watch for release notes explaining how editing works, especially whether changes the agent already made to files are rolled back when an earlier message is edited.

Also watch whether the feature reaches the Codex command line tool and other surfaces, and what Tibo announces for the remaining days of his 28 day push. Many of the replies are likely to be further feature requests.