Codex refuses to use playwright mcp
Resolved 💬 7 comments Opened Oct 20, 2025 by davidbenhaim Closed Oct 23, 2025
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
What version of Codex is running?
codex-cli 0.46.0
What subscription do you have?
max
Which model were you using?
gpt-5-codex high
What platform is your computer?
mac
What issue are you seeing?
codex refuses to use playwright mcp to interact with webpages for development / debugging:
<img width="1149" height="547" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/c63b82e2-ac3c-486a-bf4e-5bd16ffd66cc" /> (pardon my french)
playwright mcp is installed and part of the config for codex.
model = "gpt-5-codex"
model_reasoning_effort = "high"
[mcp_servers.playwright]
command = "npx"
args = ["@playwright/mcp@latest"]even if codex acknowledges its installed it refuses to interact with the webpages saying it cant or whateve reason.
What steps can reproduce the bug?
just try to get codex to use playwright mcp to debug.
What is the expected behavior?
claude code does this fine so codex should too
Additional information
this really impairs codex' ability to do webdev.
7 Comments
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<img width="1150" height="274" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/f0ee681f-8f77-4d20-8499-ac0206bbce46" />
Can you try with the 0.48 alpha CLI? We changed a few things to nudge the model to use MCP tools.
https://github.com/openai/codex/releases/tag/rust-v0.48.0-alpha.2
for sure I'll give it a shot and let you know!
yeah it really works better with mcp tools in
0.48 alpha.2I'm going to close this out for now, hopefully things are working better.
If you think there are additional issues, feel free to reopen this or another issue.
confirmed this is working way better for me now too. Thanks!