Codex How To v0.4.0 — Safer Living Wiki

Codex How To v0.4.0

Codex How To now routes prior engineering knowledge through a review-first
Living Wiki and exposes its flagship workflows through the open agent skills
ecosystem.

Highlights

• Index-first knowledge routing: AGENTS.md directs work involving prior
  decisions, experiments, or established guidance through
  knowledge/index.md before broad repository search.
• Engineering capture: maintain-codex-wiki can preserve an explicitly
  requested lesson from a merged change, incident, review finding, or measured
  run. No material change remains a valid result.
• Explicit archive: useful query synthesis can be saved as experimental,
  cited knowledge without silently becoming verified guidance.
• Stronger provenance: source records can pin revisions, identify
  superseded evidence, and declare the wiki pages they affect.
• Deterministic integrity: wiki lint now catches invalid source
  relationships, affected pages that do not cite their source, duplicate page
  titles, malformed metadata, broken links, and missing index entries.
• Open skill installation: engineering-loop and
  maintain-codex-wiki are indexed at
  skills.sh.

Install a flagship workflow

Install the complete engineering loop into Codex:

npx skills add Phelan164/codex-howto --skill engineering-loop -g -a codex -y

Install review-first knowledge maintenance:

npx skills add Phelan164/codex-howto --skill maintain-codex-wiki -g -a codex -y

List all nine repository skills without installing:

npx skills add Phelan164/codex-howto --list

Inspect every skill before use. Skills run with the permissions available to
the agent that invokes them.

Knowledge safety model

The Living Wiki remains plain Markdown under Git review:

• queries are read-only by default;
• capture, ingest, archive, and promotion require explicit intent;
• chat prose and model output are not evidence by themselves;
• official OpenAI documentation remains authoritative for current Codex
  behavior;
• generated factual changes require semantic review; and
• scheduled maintenance may report drift or prepare a draft but cannot merge
  factual changes automatically.

The release does not add a database, vector index, MCP server, copied external
corpus, automatic transcript ingestion, or autonomous merge path.

Verification

The release gate covers:

• repository structure and every relative Markdown link;
• 26 measurement and Living Wiki utility tests;
• both dependency-free engineering playground tests;
• six seeded wiki pages with zero lint warnings;
• source revisions, supersession relationships, affected-page citations, and
  duplicate-title detection;
• official skill validation for maintain-codex-wiki;
• isolated npx skills listing and Codex installation smoke tests; and
• GitHub Actions validation on the release pull request.

Feedback wanted

Useful contributions include:

• an engineering lesson that should produce no durable wiki change;
• a source revision that should mark a dependent page stale;
• a query that reads too many files or misses relevant evidence;
• an anonymized no-skill/full-skill/lean-skill measurement; or
• a maintained stack, team, language, or translation fork.

Codex How To is an independent community project. Official OpenAI
documentation remains authoritative for current product behavior.