Codex Delegate

Codex Delegate

Stop burning your frontier agent's limits on boilerplate.

Delegate implementation to the OpenAI Codex CLI — your agent writes the brief and reviews the diff.

Use your best coding agent where its judgment matters most: understanding the task, shaping the plan, and reviewing the result.

Codex Delegate is the MCP bridge that lets Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot — or any MCP client — hand implementation to the OpenAI Codex CLI, then get a clean, structured result back for review.

🧠 Frontier quality, kept

Your assistant does what frontier models are actually for: understands the task, writes a precise brief, reviews the finished diff. Codex holds its own as the implementer — guided and checked by a smarter orchestrator. The result reads like frontier work, because a frontier model planned it and signed off on it.

⚡ Done faster

Codex tears through multi-file edits while a frontier chat model would still be streaming the first file. You delegate, keep working with your assistant, and the diff shows up done.

🔋 Your limits stop being the bottleneck

Delegated work runs on the OpenAI Codex CLI and its own usage — separate from your orchestrator's chat quota, though the Codex side still bills its own way. Your Claude, Cursor, or Copilot subscription spends tokens on the brief and the review; Codex does the grinding. On API? That's the per-token grind moved off your main bill.

Features

• 📦 One result you can review — a compact JSON block: the final answer, status, the files Codex's edit tools reported changing, cumulative thread token counts, and the threadId to continue from. Fields that carry no signal are omitted.
• 📋 Plan first, then build it on the same thread — plan returns schema-validated steps for you to approve, and agent implements them. ask answers questions. review runs Codex's own reviewer over uncommitted work, a base branch, or a single commit.
• 🧵 Resume — continue a Codex thread with resumeThreadId. resumed: false tells you the context did not carry over.
• 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Run several, cancel cleanly — the same question across models, or independent workers on independent directories. cancel waits for the exit and warns when a process outlives the kill deadline.
• 🤝 One-command install — Claude Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, Cursor and VS Code take it as a plugin, with a skill that teaches your agent how to delegate well. Cursor and VS Code install the server in one click; JetBrains, Devin Desktop (Windsurf), Visual Studio and the rest add the stdio server in settings.
• 🩺 doctor — tells you exactly what's missing if setup isn't right.

Install

You need Node.js 20+ and the OpenAI Codex CLI, already logged in (codex login).

Claude Code

/plugin marketplace add andreilungeanu/codex-delegate-mcp
/plugin install codex-delegate@codex-delegate-mcp

Then just ask:

Delegate to Codex: migrate src/api from callbacks to async/await and update the tests, then walk me through what changed.

That's the whole loop — Claude writes the brief, Codex grinds through the files, Claude walks you through the diff.

Cursor

Or add it under Customize → MCPs in the sidebar, or in ~/.cursor/mcp.json (every project) or .cursor/mcp.json (this project):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "codex-delegate": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "codex-delegate-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Then ask Cursor to delegate implementation to Codex the same way.

GitHub Copilot CLI

copilot plugin install andreilungeanu/codex-delegate-mcp

Or through the marketplace, the same way as Claude Code:

copilot plugin marketplace add andreilungeanu/codex-delegate-mcp
copilot plugin install codex-delegate@codex-delegate-mcp

The server alone, without the skill: copilot mcp add codex-delegate -- npx -y codex-delegate-mcp.

More clients

VS Code — one-click install, or .vscode/mcp.json

{
  "servers": {
    "codex-delegate": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "codex-delegate-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Or run Chat: Install Plugin From Source with this repository's URL (needs the chat.plugins.enabled setting).

JetBrains AI Assistant — Settings → Tools → AI Assistant → MCP

Under Settings → Tools → AI Assistant → Model Context Protocol (MCP), click Add and paste this JSON:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "codex-delegate": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "codex-delegate-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Devin Desktop (formerly Windsurf) — ~/.config/devin/mcp_config.json

This config is for Devin Local, the default agent (Local 3.6+). On Windows the file is %APPDATA%\devin\mcp_config.json. Legacy Cascade and older Windsurf builds read ~/.codeium/windsurf/mcp_config.json.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "codex-delegate": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "codex-delegate-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Heads-up: Devin Desktop's Cascade agent caps you at 100 tools across all servers.

Visual Studio 2026 / 2022 — %USERPROFILE%\.mcp.json

{
  "servers": {
    "codex-delegate": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "codex-delegate-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Visual Studio 2022 needs 17.14+. Note the top-level key is servers, not mcpServers. A .mcp.json in the solution directory scopes it to that solution.

OpenCode — ~/.config/opencode/opencode.json or project opencode.json

OpenCode does not use mcpServers. Local servers go under mcp, with type: "local" and command as one array:

{
  "$schema": "https://opencode.ai/config.json",
  "mcp": {
    "codex-delegate": {
      "type": "local",
      "command": ["npx", "-y", "codex-delegate-mcp"],
      "enabled": true
    }
  }
}

This is the v1 shape, which OpenCode v2 still reads (v2's native form is mcp.servers).

Google Antigravity — ~/.gemini/config/mcp_config.json or workspace .agents/mcp_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "codex-delegate": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "codex-delegate-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

In the IDE: … on the agent panel → MCP Servers → Manage MCP Servers → View raw config. Antigravity 2.0, IDE, and CLI share the Gemini config file. You may need to approve the server's tools on first run.

Kilo Code — kilo.jsonc (mcp key, not mcpServers)

Same shape as OpenCode: type: "local" and command as one array.

{
  "mcp": {
    "codex-delegate": {
      "type": "local",
      "command": ["npx", "-y", "codex-delegate-mcp"],
      "enabled": true
    }
  }
}

In the VS Code extension: Settings → MCP → Add Server → Local (stdio). On Windows, if npx is not found, use command cmd with arguments /c, npx, -y, codex-delegate-mcp.

Zed — Settings → AI → MCP Servers, or context_servers in Zed settings

{
  "context_servers": {
    "codex-delegate": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "codex-delegate-mcp"],
      "env": {}
    }
  }
}

Zed's native agent uses this, and Zed forwards these servers to external agents over ACP; those agents may also read their own MCP config.

Kiro and any other MCP client

Add the following server to the client's MCP config — for Kiro, ~/.kiro/settings/mcp.json (user) or .kiro/settings/mcp.json (workspace):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "codex-delegate": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "codex-delegate-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

MIT © Andrei Lungeanu

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