Agent skills marketplaces › Codex skills

Codex skills: where Codex finds them, where to get more, and how to share them

Codex loads Agent Skills from .agents/skills/ in your repository (every folder from where you start Codex up to the repo root), from $HOME/.agents/skills/ and /etc/codex/skills/, plus two built-ins, $skill-creator and $skill-installer. Get more with $skill-installer, from the plugin directory Codex shares with ChatGPT (/plugins in Codex CLI), or with npx skills add owner/repo -a codex. Type $ or /skills to use one.

Read in OpenAI's Codex and plugin documentation, the openai/plugins repository and the skills CLI's agent table on November 13, 2026.

Where Codex looks

Codex follows symlinked skill folders, and if two skills share a name it shows both rather than merging them. Standalone skills work in Codex CLI, the IDE extension and the ChatGPT desktop app. Plugins, which carry skills too, work in Codex CLI and the desktop app but not in the IDE extension. Claude Code reads .claude/skills/ instead; the folders for every agent are in How to install agent skills.

Where to get Codex skills

The old openai/skills repository is marked deprecated in favor of openai/plugins, though OpenAI's docs still link its curated skills as examples. For the wider market (Anthropic's catalogs, graded directories, paid skills), see the full marketplace comparison.

Using a skill

• By name: type $ and pick the skill, or run /skills.
• Automatically: Codex picks a skill when your task matches its description, so a skill with a vague description rarely fires.
• Making one: $skill-creator asks what the skill does and when it should trigger, and writes the folder. By hand, a SKILL.md needs name and description in its frontmatter.
• Not showing up: Codex detects changes on its own; restart it if a new or edited skill doesn't appear.

How many skills Codex can list

At the start of a session Codex shows the model each skill's name, description and path, and that list gets at most 2% of the context window (8,000 characters when the window size is unknown). With many skills installed, Codex shortens descriptions first and may then leave skills out, with a warning. skills.max_context_tokens in config.toml raises the budget to as much as 10,000 tokens. Claude Code works the same way with a 1% budget. The practical rule is the same in both: keep the skills you use, and remove the rest.

Switching skills off

# ~/.codex/config.toml: disable one skill without deleting it
[[skills.config]]
path = "/path/to/skill/SKILL.md"
enabled = false

# a project's trusted .codex/config.toml: no bundled system skills here
[skills.bundled]
enabled = false

Each [[skills.config]] entry takes one selector: an absolute path for one skill, or a name for every skill with that name. Restart Codex after a change. To keep a skill available by $name but stop Codex choosing it on its own, add agents/openai.yaml to the skill with policy: allow_implicit_invocation: false; the same file sets its display name, icon and MCP dependencies.

Sharing Codex skills with a team

• In the repo: commit .agents/skills/. Copilot and Cursor read the same folder.
• A repo marketplace: $REPO_ROOT/.agents/plugins/marketplace.json makes plugins discoverable, and the repo's .codex/config.toml turns each one on with [plugins."name@marketplace"] enabled = true.
• A ChatGPT workspace: on Business, Enterprise and Edu, admins import and sync a GitHub marketplace and set each plugin to installed by default or available.

The trade-offs, across Codex, Claude Code and Cursor, are in Sharing skills across a team. Whatever the route, read a skill's scripts first: when a plugin's code runs through Codex, Codex's sandbox and approval policy applies, but the instructions in a SKILL.md can still steer the agent. Are agent skills safe? has a ten-point check.

Zest's Codex plugin, from the company that publishes this site, records which skills, models and tokens each Codex session used, per engineer, next to the pull requests they led to; it isn't a marketplace, and it's free for 3 seats. Zest for Codex