Codex CLI v0.128.0 Adds Persisted Goals, Enabling Agent Sessions to Survive Multi-Hour Pauses
Key Takeaways
- ▸Persisted goals allow Codex agent sessions to survive terminal restarts, laptop sleeps, and multi-hour pauses without context loss
- ▸Runtime continuation automatically resumes work via developer message injection, eliminating manual re-prompting on session resume
- ▸Real-world validation achieved 6.8M tokens and 94% cache hit rate across a 5-hour pause in a TypeScript monorepo
Summary
Anthropic shipped Codex CLI v0.128.0 on April 30, 2026, introducing persisted goals—a feature that allows agent-assisted coding sessions to survive terminal restarts, laptop sleeps, and extended pauses without losing context or requiring re-prompting. Previously, closing a terminal would end a Codex session; now, goal state is stored in an app-server persistence layer, enabling runtime continuation that automatically resumes work when the session returns.
The implementation includes app-server APIs for state tracking, model tools that allow the agent to signal completion and inspect goal status, and a TUI interface with create, pause, resume, and clear controls. Runtime continuation injects a developer message to prompt the model to continue reasoning, eliminating manual intervention on resume.
In real-world validation, a developer ran a 6.8M-token session on a TypeScript monorepo lasting 6 hours 44 minutes wall time (41 minutes of actual compute), achieving a 94% cache hit rate. The session was paused after 57 seconds when the developer closed their laptop at 9:19 PM, and automatically resumed five and a half hours later, picking up exactly where it left off without re-prompting.
The v0.128.0 release also includes scrollback reflow on terminal resize, a new codex update command for CLI self-updates, plan-mode suggestions in the composer, configurable TUI keymaps, and expanded permission profiles.
- Persistence is now a first-class feature, transforming the developer-agent contract from ephemeral to continuous
