--- title: Best agent Skills for Codex CLI slug: best-skills-for-codex type: agent-guide agent: codex targetQuery: best codex skills / codex cli skills canonical: https://top-agent-skills.com/guides/best-skills-for-codex published: 2026-08-19 updated: 2026-08-26 --- # Best agent Skills for Codex CLI The best Skills for Codex CLI are frontend-design for UI work, superpowers for planned multi-step engineering, and Trail of Bits' security Skills for review — all verified through the SKILL.md path Codex adopted in December 2025. 55 of the 206 Skills we catalogue are verified on Codex; because Codex is a terminal agent with real repo access, the review, testing, and infrastructure Skills carry their full capability here rather than a reduced one. ## How Skills install on this agent ```bash codex skills add github.com/anthropics/skills/skills/frontend-design ``` 1. Copy the Codex install command from the Skill page — Codex takes a repo-plus-path form rather than a --skill flag. 2. Run it from the project you want the Skill available in. 3. Start a new Codex session so the Skill frontmatter is read. 4. Trigger the Skill with a matching task and confirm the behaviour changed. Codex adopted the SKILL.md spec directly, so a Skill folder written for Claude Code is the same folder here — the difference is the install path form (repo plus path to the skill directory) rather than the file format. The three-tier loading model is the same: metadata always, instructions on trigger, bundled files on demand. ## The picks ### 1. frontend-design (Official) Verified on Codex and the highest-scoring Skill we catalogue. It substitutes a committed set of design decisions for the design file you do not have, which is the common case when generating UI from a terminal. - Reach for it when: Generating a page or component from scratch with no design system to inherit. - Entry: https://top-agent-skills.com/skill/frontend-design (https://top-agent-skills.com/skill/frontend-design.md) ### 2. superpowers (Community) A full engineering pipeline with TDD enforced at each stage. Terminal agents are where long-running, multi-file work actually happens, so the plan-preserving Skill matters more here than in an editor. - Reach for it when: Work that spans sessions and needs the plan to survive between them. - Entry: https://top-agent-skills.com/skill/superpowers (https://top-agent-skills.com/skill/superpowers.md) ### 3. trail-of-bits (Verified) Firm-grade security review Skills, Apache-2.0. Codex has real repo access, which is precisely the setting where a severity-tagged security pass over the whole diff beats inline suggestions. - Reach for it when: Reviewing code that touches auth, untrusted input, secrets, or payments. - Entry: https://top-agent-skills.com/skill/trail-of-bits (https://top-agent-skills.com/skill/trail-of-bits.md) ### 4. debug (Official) Replaces speculative edits with a hypothesis-and-test loop. Cheap, read-write, and verified on Codex — it changes agent behaviour on exactly the failures that burn the most session time. - Reach for it when: An intermittent or unexplained failure, before you start changing code. - Entry: https://top-agent-skills.com/skill/debug (https://top-agent-skills.com/skill/debug.md) ### 5. paddle-agent-skills (Verified) Published by Paddle, covering merchant-of-record billing — the tax and compliance side generic payment advice skips entirely. One of the higher-scoring vendor Skills verified on Codex. - Reach for it when: Selling internationally where VAT and sales-tax handling is the actual problem, not the checkout form. - Entry: https://top-agent-skills.com/skill/paddle-agent-skills (https://top-agent-skills.com/skill/paddle-agent-skills.md) ### 6. composio (Verified) One Apache-2.0 Skill that routes to a large catalogue of SaaS integrations, instead of wiring each one by hand. Verified across all seven agent targets, Codex included — the broadest compatibility of any integration Skill we list. - Reach for it when: Connecting an agent to several third-party services where building each integration separately is the bottleneck. - Entry: https://top-agent-skills.com/skill/composio (https://top-agent-skills.com/skill/composio.md) ## Limits Codex verification is narrower than Claude Code or Cursor: 55 of 206 Skills. That is a testing-coverage number, not a capability judgement — several vendor Skills in APIs, databases, and email have been verified on Claude Code and Cursor but not yet on Codex, and they are absent from these lists by policy rather than because they failed. The known real gaps are Skills built around Claude.ai upload flows or Claude API skill_id references, which have no Codex equivalent. Where a Skill you want is missing, the category page shows the full set with per-agent badges. ## Common questions **Does Codex CLI use the same SKILL.md format as Claude Code?** Yes — Codex adopted the spec directly, so the same folder works in both. Only the install command form differs: Codex takes the repo plus the path to the skill directory, rather than a repo plus a --skill flag. **Why are fewer Skills listed for Codex than for Cursor?** Because we list only what was tested. Verification is per Skill per agent and it takes real work, so coverage grows over time rather than arriving complete. A Skill missing from the Codex list has usually not been tested there yet. **Can Codex run scripts bundled inside a Skill?** Yes — Codex is a terminal agent, so bundled scripts are executable in the same way as in Claude Code. That is what makes the document and testing Skills worth installing here: the deterministic script does the work, not a fresh improvisation each time. **Do I need different Skills for Codex than for ChatGPT?** They are different surfaces with different capabilities. Codex CLI runs locally with filesystem and shell access, so it supports the full range including action-taking Skills. Judge each Skill by the surface it will run on rather than by the vendor. --- _Top Agent Skills. Machine-readable twin of https://top-agent-skills.com/guides/best-skills-for-codex._ _Catalog as one JSON file (CC BY 4.0): https://top-agent-skills.com/skills.json_