Free Skills Officially Comes To Codex 2025

Agent Skills let you extend Codex with task-specific capabilities. A skill packages instructions, resources, and optional scripts so Codex can perform a specific workflow reliably. You can share skills across teams or the community, and they build on the open Agent Skills standard.

Skills are available in both the Codex CLI and IDE extensions.

A skill captures a capability expressed through markdown instructions inside a SKILL.md file accompanied by optional scripts, resources, and assets that Codex uses to perform a specific task.

Skills use progressive disclosure to manage context efficiently. At startup, Codex loads the name and description of each available skill. Codex can then activate and use a skill in two ways:

In either method, Codex reads the full instructions of the invoked skills and any extra references checked into the skill.

Codex loads skills from these locations. A skill’s location defines its scope.

When Codex loads available skills from these locations, it overwrites skills with the same name from a scope of lower precedence. The list below shows skill scopes and locations in order of precedence (high to low):

To create a new skill, use the built-in $skill-creator skill inside Codex. Describe what you want your skill to do, and Codex will start bootstrapping your skill. If you combine it with the $plan skill, Codex will first create a plan for your skill.

You can also create a skill manually by creating a folder with a SKILL.md file inside a valid skill location. A SKILL.md must contain a name and description to help Codex select the skill:

Codex skills build on the Agent Skills specification. Check out the documentation to learn more.

Source: HackerNews