Expose Goal controls outside the interactive TUI, both for external automation and agent-side workflows.

What variant of Codex are you using?

CLI

What feature would you like to see?

Feature request: expose Goal controls outside the interactive TUI, both for external automation and agent-side workflows.

Current behavior:

• /goal resume works in the interactive TUI.
• codex exec resume <SESSION_ID> "resume the goal..." resumes the thread, but does not flip the internal Goal state from paused/blocked to active.
• Prompting the agent to resume the goal is therefore not equivalent to the /goal resume slash command.
• The agent can call get_goal() and observe goal status, timeUsedSeconds, tokensUsed, etc., but cannot resume or pause the goal through a tool.

Why this matters:
I want to automate long-running Goal work while respecting usage/rate limits. The clean path would be a scheduler or codex exec resume, but Goal mode currently requires manual TUI intervention to resume.
Without a noninteractive Goal control, the fallback is brittle UI automation such as sleeping and using xdotool to type /goal resume into the TUI.

Requested external/API surface:
Please add documented noninteractive Goal commands, for example:

• codex goal status <SESSION_ID> --json
• codex goal resume <SESSION_ID>
• codex goal pause <SESSION_ID>
• codex goal clear <SESSION_ID>

Or equivalent flags on codex exec resume, for example:

• codex exec resume <SESSION_ID> --goal-resume "continue working..."
• codex exec resume <SESSION_ID> --goal-status --json

Requested agent-side tool surface:
Please also consider exposing Goal lifecycle tools to the agent, complementing the existing get_goal() tool:

• resume_goal()
• pause_goal()
• possibly clear_goal()
• possibly get_usage() / get_rate_limits() for the same data shown by /status or /usage

Useful semantics:

• resume_goal() should resume an existing paused/blocked goal without changing the objective.
• pause_goal() should pause work without marking the goal complete or blocked.
• These tools should return the same accounting fields as get_goal(), including status, timeUsedSeconds, tokensUsed, and objective.
• They should be available in both interactive sessions and codex exec resume runs, subject to policy.
• Transitions should be auditable in the transcript, like update_goal.

Concrete use case:
A user wants to run bounded unattended Goal work from cron/systemd or another scheduler:

1. Resume the saved Codex thread.
2. Resume the existing Goal.
3. Let the agent work for a user-defined slice, e.g. 20 minutes of Goal time.
4. Have the agent pause/stop before the cap.
5. Repeat later when rate limits have reset.

Today, step 2 requires the TUI slash command or app UI. A first-class CLI/API/tool surface would make this workflow reliable without UI automation.

Additional information

Codex wrote the feature request, but I reviewed it and LGTM. Whole point was to really push the /goalmaxxing to its logical (and perhaps absurd but we'll see 😄) conclusion, hahaha!