codex-remote-control

Remote-control your Codex CLI sessions from your phone.

Codex has no remote control. Start a long run and you are tethered to that terminal — you cannot check on it from the sofa, and you certainly cannot redirect it.

Claude Code does have remote control, and a phone app. codex-remote-control is a Claude Code skill that gives a Claude session eyes and hands on your Codex sessions. Chain the two and Codex inherits the capability it does not have:

     phone                    your machine
┌──────────────┐        ┌──────────────────────┐
│  Claude Code │        │  Claude Code session │
│     app      │───────▶│          │           │
└──────────────┘ Remote │          ▼           │
                Control │    codex-remote-control      │
                        │          │           │
                        │          ▼           │
                        │   Codex CLI session  │
                        │   (running, ~/repo)  │
                        └──────────────────────┘

Install

claude plugin marketplace add sahrizvi/codex-remote-control
claude plugin install codex-remote-control@codex-remote-control

Restart Claude Code, connect Remote Control, and you are done. No configuration. Update later with claude plugin update codex-remote-control.

git clone https://github.com/sahrizvi/codex-remote-control /tmp/codex-remote-control
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -R /tmp/codex-remote-control/skills/codex-remote-control ~/.claude/skills/

What you can do

All of it is conversation. You never type a command.

See what a run is doing

You: what's codex doing?

Claude: Mid-turn in ~/code/your-project, last event 23 seconds ago. Latest message: "The warning milestone is committed as 63591b8c; clean compilation now passes with warnings-as-errors." Its last two commands both exited 0 — a compile and a commit.

You get its own words, the commands it ran, and whether they succeeded — not a guess assembled from logs.

Steer a run without going to your desk

You: tell codex to run the full suite before committing anything else

Claude: Queued to the session in ~/code/your-project. It'll pick that up when it next reads input.

You: tell it to stop after the current commit and push

Claude: Queued.

Redirect a run that has gone the wrong way, add a constraint you forgot, or tell it to wrap up — from a phone, mid-commute.

Tell working apart from stuck apart from stalled

You: is it stuck?

Claude: Not stuck — idle. It finished its turn 6 minutes ago and is waiting at the prompt.

You: is codex rate-limited?

Claude: Yes. Its 5-hour window hit 100% about 20 minutes ago, mid-task. It resets at 16:12. Zero credits to fall back on, so it's stopped until then.

From outside the terminal, working, idle, and silently out of budget look identical. The third is the one that quietly costs you an afternoon, and it is the reason this exists.

Keep track of several at once

Review worktrees and other repos leave sessions behind, so you usually have more than one.

You: which codex sessions are running?

Claude: Two. One in ~/code/your-project, running, active 1 minute ago. One in /tmp/review-worktree-1182, idle for two hours. Three older ones are finished.

Name the one you mean however is natural — by directory or by what it was asked to do:

You: what's the codex session in the review worktree doing?

You: check on the architecture audit session

You: what was that session originally asked to do?

Claude: It was given the architecture-audit prompt on 21 Aug, on branch feat/tenancy at commit 06e00be0 — running gpt-5.6-sol at low reasoning effort.

No UUIDs. Codex stores each session's opening prompt, so a few distinctive words are enough — which matters when you are on a phone.

Worth knowing before you rely on it

Remote control here is real but not symmetric:

• Instructions are one-way. They land in Codex's input queue. There's no delivery receipt — you confirm by asking for status again, or by watching the commits.
• They arrive without context. Codex sees a bare instruction with none of your Claude conversation, so keep them self-contained.
• A rate-limited session swallows them. The message waits, unread, until the window resets.
• You see what Codex says and does, never what it is thinking. Its reasoning is encrypted in the session log.
• It refuses to guess. If more than one session could be meant, it lists them and stops rather than instructing the wrong agent.
• Liveness is often unknowable. Codex only puts a session id in its command line for codex resume; a plain codex launch does not. So "confirmed running" is a positive signal, and its absence means cannot tell — never dead. State itself comes from the session's own events, which are reliable.

python3 skills/codex-remote-control/codex_session.py status   # what it's doing now
python3 skills/codex-remote-control/codex_session.py list     # every session
python3 skills/codex-remote-control/codex_session.py meta     # model, git, opening prompt
python3 skills/codex-remote-control/codex_session.py send "…" # queue an instruction

About the name

Remote Control is Claude Code's feature, not Codex's — it is what lets you drive a Claude Code session on your machine from the Claude Code app. Codex has no equivalent.

This plugin extends that reach: Claude gains the ability to read and address your Codex sessions, so Codex becomes controllable through Claude's Remote Control. The name describes the capability it borrows, not one Codex has.

An independent, third-party project. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic or OpenAI.

Requirements

Python 3.7+, standard library only — no packages to install. The codex CLI needs to be on PATH to send instructions; reading status does not use it. Set CODEX_HOME if Codex is not at ~/.codex.

Tested on 3.9 and 3.13. The floor is 3.7 because of subprocess.run(capture_output=…) and datetime.fromisoformat; the syntax itself parses back to 3.6.

License

MIT