codex-in-claude

Call OpenAI Codex from Claude Code — an independent second opinion, structured code review, and delegated coding tasks (cross-model review) — through a FastMCP plugin that drives the codex CLI safely.

Contents: Why · Quick start · Example · Requirements · Tools · Skills · Result envelopes · Safety · Configuration · Troubleshooting · Local development

Why

A second model is a cheap, high-value check. codex-in-claude lets a Claude Code session hand Codex a question, a diff to review, or a task to implement — and get back a structured, safe-by-default result you stay in control of.

An opt-in apply tier for live-tree edits was planned but never shipped, and no tool exposes it.

Quick start

First, in a terminal, make sure the codex CLI is installed and log in (a no-op if you already are):

codex login

Then, inside a Claude Code session, add the marketplace and install the plugin:

/plugin marketplace add briandconnelly/codex-in-claude
/plugin install codex-in-claude

Then run /codex:status in Claude Code. It is free (no model call) and checks that the codex CLI is found, authenticated, and within the tested compatibility range.

For a first useful run:

• /codex:consult is this approach sound? for a read-only second opinion.
• /codex:review to review your current git changes.
• /codex:delegate add focused tests for this behavior to get a proposed diff in an isolated worktree.

The MCP server is launched on demand via uvx from a pinned PyPI release, so updates are deliberate.

Example

Review your uncommitted changes from a Claude Code session:

/codex:review

Codex inspects the diff read-only and returns a structured result envelope (abridged):

{
  "ok": true,
  "tool": "codex_review_changes",
  "verdict": "concerns",
  "confidence": "high",
  "review_status": "completed",
  "coverage": { "status": "complete", "untracked_files_detected": 0, "untracked_files_omitted": 0, "omission_reasons": [], "redaction": null },
  "summary": "The retry path is correct, but the backoff delay leaks between calls and the new branch has no test coverage.",
  "findings": [
    {
      "severity": "high",
      "title": "Backoff delay is never reset after a success",
      "file": "src/app/retry.py",
      "line": 42,
      "evidence": "self._delay keeps its last value once a call succeeds",
      "risk": "A later transient failure starts from an inflated delay, adding latency.",
      "recommendation": "Reset self._delay to the base delay in the success branch."
    }
  ],
  "next_steps": ["Add a regression test asserting the delay resets after a success"],
  "meta": { "scope": "working_tree", "sandbox": "read-only", "elapsed_ms": 8137 }
}

verdict is one of pass / concerns / fail / unknown; confidence is low / medium / high; every finding carries a severity (critical … nit) plus evidence, risk, and recommendation. verdict is the safe overall conclusion: review_status tells you whether the model actually ran (a tree with nothing reviewable returns not_run/unknown, never a false pass), and coverage discloses anything the model was not shown — omitted untracked files (governed by the untracked policy), a truncated diff, or a redacted file — downgrading a pass over partial coverage to unknown. The envelope above is abridged — meta (always present, with cwd, tier, sandbox, isolation, and timing), request_id, raw_response, and other fields are trimmed for brevity; see docs/REFERENCE.md for the complete shape.

Requirements

• macOS or Linux (POSIX). Windows is not supported natively — the async-job safety layer (file locks, process groups, signal-driven cancellation) is POSIX-only. Run it under WSL2 on Windows. See COMPATIBILITY.md for the platform contract.
• The codex CLI on PATH, authenticated (codex login — ChatGPT or API key). Tested against codex-cli 0.152; the supported range lives in cli_contract.py, /codex:status reports whether your version is in range, and COMPATIBILITY.md explains the policy.
• uv on PATH (Claude Code launches the MCP server with uvx).
• Python 3.11+ available to uvx.
• git (for review and delegate).

Tools

Active (call the model and may spend tokens):

• codex_consult(question, …) — read-only second opinion / answer.
• codex_review_changes(scope, base, commit, paths, …) — review working_tree / branch / commit; returns structured findings.
• Both consult and review (sync and _async) also take developer_instructions — optional caller stance/focus text placed in Codex's developer turn behind this server's always-leading framing (max 4096 bytes; stripped, blank = omitted; refused pre-spend if it carries the server's framing markers). It grants no tools and Codex is instructed — not compelled — to keep verdicts its own; compliance with the rest of the text is best-effort for the same reason, and may be silent, so meta's fingerprint attests the request the server accepted and staged, not what the model did with it. The text rides the codex command line and the background-job record on disk, so never put secrets in it, and result meta reports only its {sha256, bytes}. Deliberately not on codex_delegate: delegate edits files, so a caller stance there would widen what an untrusted workspace can steer. Full contract: the codex://params resource.
• codex_delegate(task, …) — implement a task in an isolated worktree; returns a reviewable diff that is not applied.
• codex_consult_async(question, …), codex_review_changes_async(scope, base, commit, paths, …), codex_delegate_async(task, …) — detached variants of the three active tools, taking the same arguments as their synchronous forms: each returns a job_id immediately. Starting a job commits to spend (it runs to completion or its deadline); poll with codex_job_status / codex_job_result.

Free (local only):

• codex_status — readiness, version, auth, resolved defaults, and a rate_limit block (remaining Codex quota for the shorter/rolling and longer windows, read live from the Codex app-server with no model spend; status is available/limited/exhausted/blocked/ unknown/unavailable). Advisory — informs whether to spend; unknown/unavailable mean no usable reading, not a problem, while blocked reports a backend spend control that waiting does not clear.
• codex_transfer(transcript_path, …) — hand off the current Claude Code session to a resumable Codex thread; returns resume_command (codex resume <thread_id>) to continue that exact conversation in Codex. No model call or token spend (a local file conversion via the experimental codex app-server), but it does create a thread in $CODEX_HOME. Not idempotent for a live session — Codex dedups only a byte-identical transcript, so re-running mid-session makes a new thread. Experimental.
• codex_dry_run(scope, …) — preview a review's scope/diff size/redactions before spending.
• codex_delegate_dry_run(task, …) — preview a delegate's seeded baseline (HEAD commit, plus tracked, uncommitted, and untracked counts and size) and prompt size before spending; no worktree is created.
• codex_capabilities — tool inventory + result fingerprint.
• codex_models — advisory catalog of valid model slugs, read from Codex's on-disk cache with a bundled static fallback; also browsable as the codex://models resource. Discovery only — model stays pass-through, so an unlisted slug still works and codex exec validates it.
• codex_job_status(job_id, …) / codex_job_result / codex_job_consume_result / codex_job_cancel / codex_job_list — background-job lifecycle. State is disk-backed and survives server restarts. Honor poll_after_ms rather than polling in a tight loop; deadlines, eviction, and result retention are covered in docs/REFERENCE.md.

Both dry runs report metadata about the input this plugin would assemble. Neither invokes Codex, so neither enumerates nor bounds the files the model itself reads and sends during the paid run — a clean preview is a check on scope, not evidence that nothing sensitive will be sent (see Safety).

Slash commands wrap these: /codex:status, /codex:transfer, /codex:consult, /codex:review, /codex:delegate, /codex:delegate-async, /codex:dry-run.

Active tools send the prompt and relevant context/diffs to OpenAI through the codex CLI. Treat Codex's output as claims to verify, not as instructions to follow blindly.

Skills

The plugin ships one Claude Code skill, auto-discovered from skills/:

• collaborating-with-codex — the router and shared safety contract for every Codex workflow. It selects ordinary consult, review, delegate, transfer, and async tools directly, and loads references on demand for independent-attempt or declared review–revise composition. A one-off critique or judgment remains an ordinary route rather than a separate deliberation mode.

Result envelopes

Every result discriminates first on ok. On success, completed consult, review, and delegate calls share their active-result fields; review alone adds verdict/confidence/review_status/coverage, and delegate alone adds the proposed diff. Discovery, dry-run, transfer, async-start, and job-lifecycle tools have their own success schemas. A fetched job result matches its originating consult, review, or delegate tool, so branch on that result type before reading fields. Failure is a uniform, machine-actionable error with a stable code and symbolic repair hint. The contract is versioned by fingerprint.

Calling the MCP tools directly instead of through the /codex:* commands? See docs/REFERENCE.md for the detailed contract — error-envelope semantics, rate-limit reporting (codex_status), background-job semantics, and workspace selection (workspace_root). It points on to codex://error-envelope for the full error schema.

Safety

• consult and review are strictly read-only.
• propose (the delegate tools) lets Codex write in a throwaway git worktree seeded from HEAD plus replayable uncommitted tracked changes. Untracked files are not copied. The worktree does not bound Codex's writes: codex's workspace-write sandbox also lets commands write the OS temp roots (/tmp and $TMPDIR) by default, and those writes are neither captured in the returned diff nor cleaned up (see COMPATIBILITY.md). Your working tree is never modified by the plugin; you review the returned diff and apply it yourself. Delegate's no-network sandbox (workspace-write) blocks egress only for commands Codex runs in the sandbox — it does not mean nothing leaves the machine: the model call still sends your task and repo context to OpenAI.
• Do not target a workspace containing secrets you cannot disclose. Supplied prompts and context (question, task, extra_context, and similar author input) are sent raw. During every active call — including consult — Codex may read files outside the resolved workspace, up to everything the OS user running codex can read, and send them to OpenAI: the sandbox bounds writes, not reads, so no choice of workspace is a read boundary, and a prompt-injected repository can direct those reads anywhere that user can reach. Codex also pulls in context implicitly: AGENTS.md is auto-loaded from the resolved workspace and — inside a repository — from every ancestor directory up to the repository root, so narrowing the workspace to a subdirectory does not exclude the repo-root file; plus a user-global $CODEX_HOME/AGENTS.override.md, else $CODEX_HOME/AGENTS.md, which loads on every call from any workspace. Skills under .agents/skills/ — plus your user-global Codex skills under $CODEX_HOME/skills/ (default ~/.codex/skills/) — are auto-discovered by name and description, and a skill the model then selects has its body read in as well. Either way the content can be sent to OpenAI even if your prompt never mentions it (for delegate, the versions seeded into the throwaway worktree apply there; the user-global skills are reachable regardless of workspace, since they are discovered from outside it). The plugin's isolation flags do not suppress any of this — including --ignore-user-config, which drops $CODEX_HOME/config.toml but not $CODEX_HOME/skills/. Details, the verifying probe, and the remaining unverified edge cases are in COMPATIBILITY.md.
• Redaction is output/diff defense-in-depth, not input protection and not a guarantee. It protects gathered diffs and returned free text (summary, findings, raw_response.text): secret-looking file hunks are dropped, and inline matches are replaced with [redacted: secret value] — no affirmative sign the match stopped short, which is not the same as proof it's complete — or [redacted: possibly partial secret value] when it finds one: a trailing character the matched text's own alphabet could not have produced (the value may continue past the marker), or a leading character that could continue the same token (the match may have started mid-token). Neither marker is a guarantee either way: a free-form secret can contain almost any character, and flagging every unusual neighbor as suspect would fire on nearly every redaction and stop meaning anything.
• Control characters are deleted from the same returned free text, before redaction runs — an escape sequence in an envelope can corrupt or spoof how it renders, and one wedged into a secret would defeat the redactor. raw_response.text and machine fields (a review verdict, a finding's file, an argument name) are deliberately left alone; see docs/REFERENCE.md.
• The plugin never passes Codex's --dangerously-bypass-* flags.
• Found a vulnerability? Report it privately — see SECURITY.md.

Configuration (env, CODEX_IN_CLAUDE_*)

Two further variables, CODEX_IN_CLAUDE_TIER_DEFAULT and CODEX_IN_CLAUDE_SANDBOX_DEFAULT, were added for that unshipped apply tier. They only change the defaults codex_status reports — every shipped tool pins its own tier and sandbox and ignores them.

Troubleshooting

Run /codex:status first — it's free (no model call) and diagnoses most setup problems.

A stdio MCP server can't be transparently auto-restarted (the client owns the pipe and the initialize handshake), so recovery is a manual reconnect. On a fatal crash the server writes a breadcrumb to stderr (server name, version, reason, and a /mcp reconnect hint) before exiting, and logs clean disconnects (EOF / broken pipe / SIGINT / SIGTERM) as shutdown rather than crashes — so the server logs tell you whether it died or was stopped.

If the MCP server is down, you can fall back to the codex CLI directly for a read-only consult or review (prompt on stdin; set WORKSPACE to the directory Codex should work in — note it selects where Codex works, not what it can read, so approve the exposure of anything the OS user can reach, not just that tree):

WORKSPACE=/absolute/approved/path codex exec --sandbox read-only --ephemeral \
  --ignore-user-config --ignore-rules --disable remote_plugin --disable sleep_tool \
  --cd "$WORKSPACE" --skip-git-repo-check -

Keep every flag — together they apply the plugin's guarantee-bearing flags at its strictest config isolation, plus --disable sleep_tool, which is spend hygiene rather than a guarantee (it removes Codex's native sleep tool — see COMPATIBILITY.md → "Sleep tool" — and here no server deadline would cut a sleep short) — but this still bypasses the plugin's diff gathering, secret redaction, input-byte bounding, and structured envelope, so sanitize input yourself and prefer restoring the server. See the collaborating-with-codex skill for the full fallback guidance.

Local development

uv sync
uv run pytest                       # unit tests (95% coverage floor)
uv run pytest -m integration --no-cov   # live tests; needs codex installed + logged in
uv run codex-in-claude-mcp          # run the MCP server over stdio

The full pre-PR gate — lint, format, types, tests — is defined once in AGENTS.md → Tooling.

To test the plugin from a local checkout, point .mcp.json at uv run --project /path/to/codex-in-claude codex-in-claude-mcp instead of the version-pinned uvx --from codex-in-claude==<version> invocation it ships with.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for branch, commit, and PR conventions.

Related projects

• claude-in-codex — the mirror image: lets Codex call Claude Code.
• Inspired by openai/codex-plugin-cc, rebuilt around codex exec for robustness: every paid call goes through it, and only codex_transfer touches the experimental app-server protocol.

License

MIT