Codex Cli Skills

A codex project documentation skill is a portable, SKILL.md-based capability that lets an AI coding agent plan work as traceable YAML contracts and record every execution step, so the reasoning behind a project survives as an auditable archive instead of vanishing into a chat log. Project Orrery implements exactly this: it turns high-level goals into executable, engineered workflows whose state lives in a .agent-work/ directory with plans/, reports/, and completed/ subdirectories. Because the skill is built on the open agent skills standard, the same skill works in Codex CLI, Claude Code, Cursor, and Gemini CLI. ...

AI agents need skills because a single monolithic instruction file like AGENTS.md forces the entire knowledge base into the agent’s context window on every interaction, degrading performance, increasing cost, and reducing accuracy. Skills solve this by using progressive disclosure — the agent sees only a skill’s name and description upfront, and loads the full instructions only when it decides the skill is relevant. This architectural pattern, borrowed from how human experts organize knowledge, is the difference between handing someone a 500-page manual and letting them ask for the chapter they need. ...