Codex agent sessions show AGENTS.md instructions instead of actual session titles

[solankydev]

Description

In the Agent sessions view for Codex, every session title appears to start with # AGENTS.md instructions instead of showing the actual Codex session title or prompt-derived title.

From the screenshot, the list shows repeated entries such as:

• # AGENTS.md instructions · codex
• # AGENTS.md instructions for E:\Personal\sw-projects...
• # AGENTS.md instructions for E:\Work\software-projec...

This makes it difficult to identify or reopen the intended Codex session, because many unrelated sessions collapse to the same visible title.

Expected behavior

Each Codex agent session should display its actual session title, or another user-distinguishable title derived from the real session, rather than the shared AGENTS.md instruction header.

Actual behavior

All or most Codex agent sessions are titled from the AGENTS.md instructions content, so the session list contains many nearly identical titles.

Screenshot context

The screenshot shows the Intelligent Terminal Agent sessions panel with Agent sessions: Codex at the top and a list of sessions where the visible title repeatedly begins with # AGENTS.md instructions.

Environment

• Shell shown: PowerShell
• Agent/session type: Codex
• App: Intelligent Terminal

I do not know whether this is caused by the session title extraction logic reading injected/user-level instructions before the actual session prompt, but the visible result is that the session list is not using useful per-session titles.

[solankydev]

Additional detail after checking the same behavior in another Codex session browser:

This does not appear to be limited to Intelligent Terminal's UI. I also see similar titles in another app that reads Codex sessions.

The relevant pattern seems to be:

• Codex's indexed session metadata can contain the correct user-facing title.
• The raw session transcript can include an early injected instruction/context message whose text starts with # AGENTS.md instructions.
• A client that derives a display title by scanning the raw transcript and selecting the first user-role text can therefore pick the injected instructions instead of the actual user request.

So the issue may be in whichever layer chooses the session title from raw Codex transcript data. A robust fix would likely skip injected instruction/context blocks, or prefer Codex's explicit/indexed session title when available, rather than deriving the title from the first user-role transcript item.