December 20, 2025
Power-up or copycat?
Skills Officially Comes to Codex
Codex gets “Skills” power-ups and the crowd goes wild-ish
TLDR: Codex now supports shareable “Skills” that add task-specific abilities, which it can auto-use or be called on demand. Commenters are split between hype, comparisons to Anthropic and Copilot, and requests for real-world proof—plus jokes about web/iOS not supporting explicit calls yet—making this a big, buzzy upgrade.
Codex just got “Skills,” basically little power-ups that teach it how to do specific jobs using a simple SKILL.md file and optional helper scripts. You can stash these skills in your project, your home folder, or even system-wide—and Codex can pick them up automatically or when you call them by name. That’s the news. The comments? Peak tech soap opera.
One camp, led by rochansinha, calmly spells out the feature like it’s the manual, while summarity drops receipts, linking similar moves from Anthropic and Copilot. Cue the “is Codex catching up?” debate. Meanwhile, stared arrives with confetti: “excited they come to Codex,” cheering the cross-platform skill moment. haffi112 flips it into a party game: favorite skills roll call. And karolcodes wants receipts: does this actually work in real agent workflows?
There’s also snark about explicit skill calling (typing $ or a slash command) not being supported on web or iOS yet—memes about “press $ to feel nothing” made an appearance. A few raised eyebrows at the many places skills can live (“who’s the folder sheriff?”), but the vibe is mostly power-up optimism with a side of “prove it,” and plenty of show-and-tell energy.
Key Points
- •Codex adds Agent Skills to extend the agent with task-specific capabilities packaged in SKILL.md plus optional scripts/resources.
- •Skills are available in Codex CLI and IDE extensions; explicit invocation is not yet supported in web and iOS.
- •Codex supports explicit invocation (/skills or $ mentions) and implicit invocation based on task matching, using progressive disclosure.
- •Skills can be created via the built-in $skill-creator (optionally with $plan) or manually by defining a SKILL.md with name and description.
- •Skills load from layered locations (repo, user, admin, system) with precedence; duplicates are overwritten by higher layers, and $skill-installer can fetch curated skills from GitHub.