codex-image-genlisted
Install: claude install-skill shipshitdev/skills
# Codex Image Gen
Generate a real raster image from a text prompt when the running agent has no
native image generator. The mechanism is non-obvious: the headless `codex exec`
path genuinely calls the image tool, but it never writes the PNG to disk — only
the Codex desktop app has the plumbing that polls the async job and saves it.
The finished image is still recoverable, because its full base64 PNG is recorded
in the session rollout JSONL. Run the prompt, read the session id Codex prints,
open the matching rollout, and decode the largest `result` string to a PNG.
## When this is the right tool
- The agent needs a generated raster image (icon, illustration, texture, app
icon, placeholder art) and has no built-in image-generation tool.
- A `codex` CLI is installed and logged in, and shelling out to it is allowed.
- A vector result is **not** required — this produces a PNG, not an SVG.
If a native image tool exists, prefer it. If the deliverable is a logo or crisp
vector, prefer a vector workflow.
## Why the naive approach fails
Running `codex exec "draw a ..."` and then watching `~/.codex/generated_images/`
produces nothing: that folder is written by the desktop app's async-job poller,
not by `codex exec`. People conclude CLI image generation is impossible. It is
not — the completed image lives in the session rollout as the `result` field of
the image-generation response item. This skill reads it from there.
## Pipeline
### 1. Write the prompt to a file
Avoid shell-