During March 2026, Chris Conger developed two backend features across the openai/codex and zed-industries/codex repositories, focusing on reliability and observability. In openai/codex, Chris implemented a thread-level atomic elicitation counter in Rust, enabling command execution timeouts to pause while awaiting user input, which reduced false timeouts during interactive CLI workflows. For zed-industries/codex, Chris enhanced request tracing by mapping a new x-client-request-id header to conversation IDs, improving end-to-end traceability over WebSocket communication. The work demonstrated depth in asynchronous programming and API development, delivering targeted improvements with minimal code surface area and clear business value for analytics and incident response.