Add a documented way to open Codex Desktop on a workspace with a prefilled initial prompt or session

Open 💬 0 comments Opened Jun 3, 2026 by LemuelCushing

What variant of Codex are you using?

App (GUI)

What feature would you like to see?

codex app [PATH] can open Codex Desktop on a workspace, and codex [PROMPT] can start a CLI session with an initial prompt.

I could not find a documented way to combine those two behaviors: open Codex Desktop on a workspace and also pre-seed the initial prompt or session.

A documented solution for any of these would help:

  • open Codex Desktop on a workspace and start a new thread with a supplied prompt
  • open Codex Desktop on a workspace and prefill the composer with a supplied prompt
  • expose a documented app-server / remote-control API for creating a new desktop thread with initial user content

Examples:

codex app /path/to/repo --prompt "..."

or

codex app /path/to/repo --prompt-file /tmp/prompt.txt

Today I can find:

  • codex [PROMPT] for CLI startup
  • codex app [PATH] for desktop workspace open

But I cannot find a documented bridge between them.

Additional information

This would make it much easier to build task-specific local launchers and workflow entrypoints that hand off into Codex Desktop without losing startup context.

Right now those launchers have to choose between:

  • CLI with proper prompt injection
  • Desktop app with no documented startup prompt handoff

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