Agent Profile selector
Hi Codex team,
Problem
In real workflows, I need to switch instruction sets frequently for different general tasks (e.g., coding vs. paper-writing vs. research/planning), each of which triggers different agents.md and skill sets. Meanwhile, some monorepo contains multiple sub-tasks (e.g., preliminary experiment planning & complex system implementation).
Today, the extension pulls instructions via the CLI discovery mechanism (global/project AGENTS.md), which makes switching cumbersome and error-prone:
- It requires renaming/moving ~/.codex/AGENTS.md, or
- launching the IDE with different CODEX_HOME, or
- symlinks/overrides that are fragile and hard to reason about.
- manually copy the same agents.md for each monorepo
This is a UX mismatch: the extension already provides a convenient model switcher, but there is no equivalent for instruction profiles.
Proposed UX
Add an “Agent Profile” dropdown in the extension UI:
- Shows current profile name
- Lets users switch profiles in 1–2 clicks
- Clearly indicates the active instruction source (Global / Workspace / Session)
Why this matters
Agent instructions are as impactful as model choice. A fast, explicit selector reduces mistakes and makes the extension usable across mixed workflows.
Thanks!
Additional information
_No response_
3 Comments
Really missing that. Similar feature request:
Hope it will be implemented by the team. The community can't send PRs for that.
You may find the new "skills" feature to be useful here. You can define different skills and invoke them explicitly by name using
$skill_1or$skill_2. Each skill can provide different instructions. For details, refer to this documentation.Another option is to define custom prompts, which can be invoked using slash commands.
This feature request hasn't received enojgh upvotes, so I'm going to close it.