Ability to disable / select a narrow set of specific skills for session
Open 💬 8 comments Opened Jan 23, 2026 by slobodaapl
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
What feature would you like to see?
Currently there are no CLI arguments that allow excluding / disabling a skill, or otherwise to list a comma separated list of skills allowed for a particular session (as a narrower set rather than all skills by default).
I would like to in some circumstances be able to start codex with some skill or another disabled.
Example: codex --disabled-skills sayhello,solvequantumgravity
8 Comments
Thanks for the suggestion. You're correct that there's currently no specialized command-line option for disabling skills. We might consider adding this if there's sufficient demand.
In the meantime, you can use the (admittedly cumbersome)
--configconfig override mechanism:i know that the agent can decide to choose the skills based on the description but i would like to mention specific skills before it starts going about with the task. This is because the agent is fetching at time unrelated skills to the task which is polluting its thinking process.
You can already do this by using the $ dollar sign, e.g.
We need an option to disable automatic skill selection, we are not there yet on this. They will often pick a skill when you are just chatting about an idea, and then trigger some ridiculous thing or answer a previous question because of that setting.
+1.
Running
codex execis loading the entire skillset, which is painful. We need an analog of Claude's--bare+1
+1
+1. I've noticed performance degrades as the number of installed Skills grows. It seems Skills are sometimes detected/considered even when they aren't needed (see #14941), so I wonder if the Skill discovery/relevance step is contributing to the slowdown.