✗ Error creating task timeout

Error creating task is a whole family of failures wearing one generic string — reported variants include timeout, no rollout found for thread id, and plain Error starting conversation. The pattern that runs through nearly every report: the Codex CLI keeps working in the same project while the IDE extension, desktop app, or cloud task fails.

Symptoms

• Sending a prompt in the VS Code extension fails instantly with Error creating task or Error starting conversation, in a project that worked two days earlier and still works in the CLI.
• The timeout variant hits when prompting inside an old thread — two reporters in April 2026 say new threads work fine while resumed ones fail.
• On cloud, the failure reads Failed to Create Task or Failed to Create Follow-Up, documented in a July 2025 forum thread.
• On the desktop app, users report a crash followed by persistent task-creation failures that survive restarts.

Cause

OpenAI has not published a single root cause, and both tracking issues remain open. Individual cases have been traced, though. The #9001 reporter found a SKILL.md file with invalid YAML under ~/.codex/skills/ — the CLI printed the parse error, while the extension failed silently, and an OpenAI maintainer agreed the extension should surface a better error instead. Another commenter hit the same wall from invalid TOML in ~/.codex/agents/*.toml. The July 2025 cloud wave was service-side, recovering within the hour for many users. The app layer chokes on unparseable local config, stale thread state, or a service incident, and reports all three with the same string.

Fix

1. Run the CLI in the same project. If codex works, the fault is the app layer; if it errors, read the output — the CLI surfaced the parse error behind the original #9001 report.
2. Check ~/.codex for recently edited config. Broken YAML in a SKILL.md or broken TOML in agents/*.toml both reproduce this. Recent AGENTS.md edits are worth checking too.
3. Start a fresh thread. The timeout variant clusters in resumed threads.
4. Restart, then reinstall, the extension or app. A restart was the maintainer’s first suggestion, one commenter fixed it with a VS Code restart, and another by reinstalling the extension.
5. Check status.openai.com. The cloud variant has been an outage before.
6. Still stuck? Run /feedback to upload logs and post your thread ID on #9001 — maintainers ask reporters for both.

Affected versions

Reports span extension versions 0.4.74 through 0.5.74, CLI 0.72 through 0.101, and desktop builds, from December 2025 into May 2026; an April 2026 comment says it still happened on the latest version. No release note marks this class fixed; we’ll update this page when one does.

Facts on this page verified July 15, 2026.