OpenAI has launched Skills in Codex, a feature that enables developers to customize the Codex coding agent with task-specific capabilities. The service uses pre-built packages or custom scripts, which developers can create through natural-language prompts or manually written code. These skills bundle instructions, resources, and optional scripts to allow Codex to execute specific workflows reliably, according to OpenAI’s developer documentation.
Pre-built skills are available through GitHub. Developers can install skills globally in the ~/.codex/skills/ directory or scope them to individual repositories. The feature employs progressive disclosure to manage context, loading essential information at startup and accessing full details on demand.
The announcement follows OpenAI’s release of GPT-5.2-Codex last week, which the company called its “most advanced agentic coding model yet.”
OpenAI’s Skills in Codex builds on the Agent Skills standard, originally released by Anthropic on December 18. The specification is hosted at agentskills.io. It has been adopted by Microsoft, GitHub, Cursor, Goose, Amp, OpenCode, and others. “We’re launching Agent Skills as an independent open standard with a specification and reference SDK available at https://agentskills.io,” said Mahesh Murag, a product manager at Anthropic, in comments to VentureBeat. “Microsoft has already adopted Agent Skills within VS Code and GitHub; so have popular coding agents like Cursor, Goose, Amp, OpenCode, and more.”
Anthropic first introduced Agent Skills in October 2023 as a developer feature for its Claude AI assistant. The company has partnered with Atlassian, Figma, Canva, Stripe, Notion, and Zapier to offer pre-built skills.
The launch occurs amid competition among AI developers to improve coding agents. Amazon Web Services revealed “powers” for its Kiro coding agent at the re:Invent conference earlier this month. These provide similar expertise modules through Model Context Protocol servers and steering files. AWS described powers as “expertise modules that give the Kiro agent instant knowledge of specific technologies and frameworks.”
