Skip to content
Elicitly

Troubleshooting

Fixes for common problems connecting to and using Elicitly. If your issue isn’t here, contact us.

ChatGPT / Codex: a working connector stops responding (“tool isn’t available in this session”)

Section titled “ChatGPT / Codex: a working connector stops responding (“tool isn’t available in this session”)”

Symptom. A ChatGPT Desktop / Codex MCP connector that worked before suddenly can’t run its tools. The assistant says something like:

elicit_ping isn’t available in this session, so I couldn’t run it.

The tools quietly vanish from the session, no Authenticate button appears, and none of the obvious recoveries help — toggling the server off and on, Refresh, uninstalling and re-adding it, or fully restarting the app. In logs you may see invalid_refresh_token, invalid_grant, OAuth token refresh failed, or Auth required.

Cause — it’s not the server. This is a known Codex client issue, not an Elicitly one. Codex’s embedded MCP client held an OAuth refresh token, tried to use it, and the authorization server rejected it as invalid_refresh_token — a normal event, because refresh tokens rotate on use and expire. A compliant client re-authenticates automatically at that point. Codex instead keeps the dead credential, retries it forever, and never surfaces re-authentication. The Elicitly server is unaffected — a different client (for example Claude Desktop) authenticates the same endpoint normally at the same moment.

Fix. Clear the dead credential from the command line — the in-app uninstall does not do this, which is why reinstalling never helped:

Terminal window
codex mcp logout <server-name>   # e.g. your Elicitly Pro connector's name

Then restart ChatGPT / Codex. The Authenticate button reappears — click it (or run codex mcp login <server-name>) to re-authorize in the browser. codex mcp list shows each server’s current auth state.

Known upstream issues — 👍 these to help OpenAI prioritize the fix:

  • openai/codex#39054 — a rejected refresh token stays “usable”, so Codex retries it forever and never surfaces re-authentication
  • openai/codex#38198 — Codex Desktop: connector permanently disabled with no re-authenticate affordance after a failed refresh
  • openai/codex#29630 — Codex doesn’t re-register (DCR) on invalid_client / expired refresh token
  • openai/codex#14144 / #32590 — after a successful re-login, the running session keeps using stale credentials until the app is restarted

Not affected. The Free Edition is a local stdio server (npx -y elicitly) with no OAuth, so this can’t happen there. Claude Desktop also recovers from a failed refresh cleanly — see the Elicitation Support Matrix, which tracks elicitation capability (where ChatGPT/Codex leads) separately from connection reliability (where it currently lags).