What feature would you like to see?

Summary

• Purpose: Persist a privacy-safe transcript of Codex CLI sessions to aid future reference, onboarding, and reproducibility.
• Modes: Autogenerated during sessions and on-demand via /transcribe or /summarize.
• Scope: Session summaries and verbatim logs (with redaction), stored in-repo and kept current as the project evolves.
• Parity: Lives alongside AGENTS.md as a canonical, evolving artifact relevant to the repo/project.
• Inspiration: Inspired by Codex v0.25.0’s transcript highlight shortcut (Ctrl+T), extending it into persistent, commit-friendly artifacts.

Motivation

• Reproducibility: Capture decisions, commands, and reasoning to rerun or audit work.
• Onboarding: Provide new contributors a concise evolution of agent interactions and key changes.
• Traceability: Link tool calls and patches to resulting files/commits for clearer provenance.
• Knowledge retention: Preserve ephemeral chat context and CLI actions beyond scrollback.
• Reduce drift: Keep a living record, similar in importance to AGENTS.md, that evolves with user interactions and the project itself.

Goals

• Configurable transcripts: Per-session summary and optional verbatim logs with redaction.
• Git-friendly storage: Text-first artifacts safe to commit; deterministic filenames.
• Minimal friction: “Always-on” auto mode and explicit slash commands.
• Privacy by default: Built-in secret redaction and opt-outs for sensitive content.

Non-Goals

• Full deterministic replay of entire sessions beyond what’s logged.
• Storing raw sensitive data or non-consented PII.
• Replacing AGENTS.md; instead, complement or cross-link it.

User Stories

• Contributor: “As a user, I want a session summary I can commit so teammates can understand what changed and why.”
• Maintainer: “As a maintainer, I want a redact-safe transcript to audit agent actions without leaking secrets.”
• New teammate: “As a newcomer, I want a chronological record to see how the project evolved via Codex.”
• Security lead: “As a security reviewer, I need configurable redaction and opt-out options per module.”

Proposed Design

• Transcript store: Create codex/transcripts/ at repo root (or .codex/transcripts/ if hidden preferred).
• Session files:
  • Summary: YYYY-MM-DD_session-N_summary.md (high-level, commit-friendly).
  • Verbatim: YYYY-MM-DD_session-N_log.md (detailed, redacted).
• Index: Maintain codex/TRANSCRIPTS.md with a chronological index and links, plus cross-link from AGENTS.md.
• Redaction: Apply default secret scrubbing + user-defined patterns before writing to disk.
• Hooks: Emit transcript entries on tool calls, patches, plan updates, and important assistant messages.

UX Flows

• Auto mode: Enable in config; Codex streams content to transcript files as the session progresses.
• Slash commands:
  • /.transcribe start|stop: Toggle logging within a session.
  • /.summarize [level]: Generate a summary now (concise|detailed).
  • /.transcribe redact add "<regex>": Add runtime redaction rules.
• Session end: Auto-append final summary and “next steps” to the summary file and update the index.

Data & Storage

• Paths:
  • codex/transcripts/ for per-session files.
  • codex/TRANSCRIPTS.md top-level index.
• File hygiene: Keep each session self-contained; limit single-file growth; prefer multiple small files.
• Determinism: Name sessions by date and increment; include optional repo SHA short-hash in filename.

Privacy & Redaction

• Defaults: Redact common secrets by pattern (API keys, tokens, .env values, private keys).
• Context-aware scrubbing: Mask outputs from known sensitive files (.env, id_rsa, OS keychains).
• Custom rules: Allow config-level and command-level regex/additive rules; preview redaction before write on demand.
• Opt-outs: Respect per-project settings to disable verbatim logs or specific data classes.
• Manual confirmation: Prompt before logging large binary outputs or suspected secrets.

Configuration

• File: codex/config.json (or leverage existing Codex config if present).
• Keys:
  • transcripts.enabled (bool), transcripts.mode (auto|manual), transcripts.level (summary|verbatim|both).
  • transcripts.path (string), transcripts.filenameTemplate (string).
  • transcripts.redaction.enabled (bool), transcripts.redaction.patterns (array of regex), transcripts.maxOutputBytes (int).
  • transcripts.gitIntegration.commitMessageTemplate (string).
• Overrides: Per-submodule overrides when running from nested directories.

Git Integration

• Friendly commits: Optionally suggest or stage transcript files with a templated message.
• Linking: Include commit SHAs and file paths in transcripts; embed links to diffs when available.
• CI safety: Ensure transcripts contain no secrets; provide a pre-commit redaction check.

File Format

• Markdown: Human-readable, reviewable in PRs, easily diffed.
• Sections (summary): Context, high-level plan, key commands run, files modified, rationale, next steps.
• Sections (verbatim): Timestamps, user prompts, assistant responses (truncated if needed), tool calls, command outputs (redacted).
• Metadata header: Session ID, repo status (branch/SHA), Codex version, config snapshot hash.

API / Extensibility

• Events: Expose transcript lifecycle events (onStart, onEntry, onError, onEnd) for plugins.
• Export: Provide codex export --session <id> --format <md|json> for downstream tooling.
• Query: codex transcripts list|show <id> to browse and inspect past sessions.

Acceptance Criteria

• Creates and updates codex/transcripts/*.md and codex/TRANSCRIPTS.md in a sample repo.
• Captures tool calls, patches, and plan updates with timestamps.
• Redacts secrets by default; supports user-defined patterns.
• /.transcribe start|stop and /.summarize work during a session.
• Produces clean, commit-safe Markdown that passes a pre-commit redaction check.
• Scales across multi-module repos without leaking unrelated secrets.

Open Questions

• Should default location be hidden (.codex/transcripts/) to reduce noise?
• Do we include partial command outputs by default (first/last N lines) to balance size vs. context?
• Should there be a “private transcript” mode written outside the repo for sensitive sessions?
• How to handle extremely long sessions—rollover policy by size/time?

Risks

• Accidental sensitive data capture if redaction misses a pattern.
• Repository noise if transcripts are too verbose or misconfigured.
• User confusion between AGENTS.md and transcripts without clear cross-linking.

Mitigations

• Conservative defaults, pre-commit redaction checks, and prominent warnings.
• Concise summaries by default; verbatim requires explicit enable or size caps.
• Clear cross-links and a short “How to use transcripts” block in AGENTS.md.

Future Work

• Replay assist: Generate a minimal “reproduce session” script for core steps.
• Semantic search: Index transcripts for query across sessions.
• Inline PR annotations: Auto-comment key session excerpts relevant to a PR.
• Multi-user sessions: Merge transcripts from multiple teammates with authorship tags.

Are you interested in implementing this feature?

No response

Additional information

Codex-cli should be the main product offered with the plus subscription. Way easier to use than the web-based product.