Ability to disable / select a narrow set of specific skills for session
Open 💬 9 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
9 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.
I built CLROOM around exactly this problem.
The
--configworkaround above works, but it gets cumbersome fast because you have to keep listing what to disable.CLROOM flips that around: start with global skills out, then name only the ones you want for this launch.
Project skills stay available automatically. Unselected global skills and global
AGENTS.mdstay out, and your normal Codex setup is not rewritten.You can also save reusable skill sets such as
@review,@planning, or@fixes.For the
--bare-style use case mentioned above, a plain:starts Codex without global instructions or global skills, while keeping the current project context available.
Normal Codex arguments still pass through, for example:
Apps, hooks and plugins are off by default.
If you want to use CLROOM for normal day-to-day work, I recommend launching Codex with:
This keeps the skill filtering while bringing apps, hooks and plugins back for that launch.
Current alpha: macOS / Apple Silicon
https://github.com/ewgenij87snwork/clean-room-launcher
40-second demo:
https://youtu.be/YAEUJM-_VeE
I’m the author. If this is still a pain point for you, I’d really like to know what CLROOM still misses for your workflow.