Support “pair programming” mode

Resolved 💬 1 comment Opened Nov 20, 2025 by metaconscious Closed Jan 10, 2026

What feature would you like to see?

In the current Codex workflow, there is effectively only one context / one agent:

  • Over time, Codex can become locked into a single “developer mindset”.
  • Once it has made a design choice, it often continues to reinforce it instead of questioning it.
  • “Self‑review” within the same context tends to be less critical, because the same context that wrote the code is also reviewing it.

As a result, I don’t get the same value I would from real pair programming, where one person is building and the other is actively, independently reviewing.

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I’d like Codex to support a dual‑context workflow, similar to pair programming:

  • One “persona” acts as the developer (implements changes, runs tools, edits files).
  • A separate “persona” acts as the reviewer (reviews code, raises issues, challenges assumptions).
  • Their conversational contexts are isolated: they don’t share internal history, only the repository/filesystem and what the user explicitly passes between them.

This would allow Codex to simulate two independent minds collaborating on the same codebase, which I expect would produce better results than the current single‑context workflow.

Additional information

Currently, I can approximate this by running two separate Codex sessions in two terminals, each with a different prompt, and manually passing diffs between them. But this is clumsy and loses a lot of the benefits of having a first‑class, integrated pair‑programming mode.

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