[Bug]: Projects can be duplicated for some reason, and trying to remove the duplicate project doesn't work

[TomerGamerTV]

Before submitting

• I searched existing issues and did not find a duplicate.
• I included enough detail to reproduce or investigate the problem.

Area

apps/desktop

Steps to reproduce

1. Create a project by selecting folder X
2. Do some stuff in it, doesn't matter
3. Click plus button and select the same folder
4. Now you got 2 projects with the same name, but not with the same chats
5. Try to delete the duplicate project, button doesn't do anything.

(Not sure if this is part of what caused the issue, but I switched accounts, and because my project didn't load fast enough I thought I needed to select that folder again. Maybe that's why the issue happened?)

Expected behavior

Remove project button to actually work, and that project shouldn't have been created in the first place. I should have gotten some kind of error says "Project with this folder already exists"

Actual behavior

Remove project button doesn't work

Having duplicate projects in the sidebar, same exact folder, but no chats in it.

Impact

Cosmetic issue

Version or commit

0.0.15

Environment

Windows 11, 0.0.15, Bun is 1.3.6 and Node is v25.8.2

Logs or stack traces

Not sure where to find those.

Screenshots, recordings, or supporting files

GkN20MaJjy.png

Workaround

Nothing that I tried worked.

[jonsing]

Im not able to reproduce this and looking at the client code there is a guard against adding projects with duplicate workspaceRoot (folder path). But with that said, in "server" side code this check is not performed. The project.create handler only checks for duplicate projectId, not workspaceRoot so it might be theoretically possible to create two projects with the same workspaceRoot if the client check was not executed for some reason.

This is also true for the project.meta.update command. It could change the workspaceRoot to collide with another project entry.

@TomerGamerTV - can you provide some more details on the "account switch" you did. I'm not sure what you mean here.

[TomerGamerTV]

I ran out of credits, T3 complained, I either closed it first or kept open, went into codex cli and logged out and then logged back in with a different account. And then I started T3 code again

I saw that my projects were missing, so I thought T3 doesn’t save projects when changing accounts so I decided to add my folder again, and the moment I did that my previous folder showed up together with its chats.

So now I’m stuck with an unremovable duplicate project…

[jonsing]

I ran out of credits, T3 complained, I either closed it first or kept open, went into codex cli and logged out and then logged back in with a different account. And then I started T3 code again

I saw that my projects were missing, so I thought T3 doesn’t save projects when changing accounts so I decided to add my folder again, and the moment I did that my previous folder showed up together with its chats.

So now I’m stuck with an unremovable duplicate project…

Thanks for the info! There is no connection between linked accounts and projects in the data model so this must be some issue with state transfer between server and client code that allowed you to create a new project that passed client validations before state had been loaded completely. I will try and reproduce this to verify.

[jonsing]

Performance numbers with a 50 project seed and a few threads in each project. I ran this a few time (on MacBook M4) and times are very consistent with what is shown below, around 82 ms until the snapshot is loaded from sqlite.

__root.tsx:60 [t3:bootstrap] Timing summary
WS connect:           40ms   (transport-created -> ws-open)
Server ready:         10ms   (ws-open -> welcome-received)
Snapshot fetch:       32ms   (welcome-received -> snapshot-received)
State sync:            1ms   (snapshot-received -> bootstrap-complete)
Loaded:              181ms   (bootstrap-complete -> ui-rendered)
--------------------
Total:               264ms   (transport-created -> ui-rendered)

I will try and retest this on a Windows machine tomorrow with the environment specs given just to be sure it's consistent with above.

Idea:

Be even more conservative during startup to avoid this potential issue, interaction with the sidebar's "add project" button could be prevented until the initial snapshot has fully loaded. Their seems to exists a mechanism for checking this already.

 // 1. Read bootstrapComplete from store (after line 442)
 const projects = useStore((store) => store.projects);
 const serverThreads = useStore((store) => store.threads);
 const bootstrapComplete = useStore((store) => store.bootstrapComplete); // add this

 // 2. Disable the "add project" + button (line 2024-2032)
 <button
   type="button"
   aria-label={shouldShowProjectPathEntry ? "Cancel add project" : "Add project"}
   aria-pressed={shouldShowProjectPathEntry}
   disabled={!bootstrapComplete}
   className="inline-flex size-5 cursor-pointer items-center justify-center
 rounded-md text-muted-foreground/60 transition-colors hover:bg-accent
 hover:text-foreground disabled:cursor-not-allowed disabled:opacity-40"
   onClick={handleStartAddProject}
 />

[TomerGamerTV]

Yeah, sorry, I’m not sure what to tell you. You could try using Windows, and maybe that will help you reproduce the issue. However, I might have just encountered an edge case.

Either way, I believe it’s possible to prevent this kind of behavior in the future, as you suggested, by making some changes to the code.

[TomerGamerTV]

Issue is still happening on . 17

Another thing you could try to debug is create a thread with something in a test folder, close t3code, delete that folder and recreate it (I did it with a git repo), and it should appear two times.

Remove project button still doesn't work on the ghost project

[juliusmarminge]

Closing as fixed by merged PR #3829, which enforces normalized workspace-root uniqueness server-side and hides stale duplicate project rows.