VS Code extension does not load custom prompts from symlinks in ~/.codex/prompts
Resolved 💬 4 comments Opened Jan 2, 2026 by 0xYiliu Closed Jan 22, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
Hi Codex team — I found a behavior mismatch between the Codex CLI and the VS Code extension.
Steps to reproduce:
1) Create a custom prompt file in a repo, e.g. <repo>/.codex/prompts/biz.md
2) Symlink it into ~/.codex/prompts/biz.md
3) Restart VS Code and open Codex
4) Try to use /prompts:biz
Observed:
- Codex CLI shows the prompt and works with the symlink.
- VS Code extension does NOT show or load the prompt when it is a symlink.
- If I replace the symlink with a real file (copy the file contents into ~/.codex/prompts/biz.md), the prompt appears and works immediately.
Expected:
- The VS Code extension should read symlinked files in ~/.codex/prompts, same as the CLI.
Environment:
- OS: Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS (WSL2, kernel 6.6.87.2-microsoft-standard-WSL2)
- VS Code: 1.100.0
- Extension: openai.chatgpt@0.5.56
- Mode: /local
generated by GPT-5.2-Codex
4 Comments
We have decided to deprecate support for custom prompts. We recommend switching to skills, which provide all of the functionality of custom prompts and more.
@etraut-openai Thanks for the update. Regardless of the approach (skills vs. prompts), the issue is the same: the extension does not recognize skills if they are symlinks.
Symlinks should work for skills as long as the symlink is used to point to the skill folder. Symlinks to the inner SKILL.md file are not supported. The folder is the package boundary of a skill.
Awesome, thanks for the quick response. Confirmed: symlinks work properly for skills as long as the symlink points to the skill folder.