Claude Ask

Claude Ask is an open-source Codex plugin that runs a locally authenticated Claude Code Sonnet 5, Fable, or Opus model as an independent second opinion or full autonomous coding agent.

It provides five persistent asynchronous MCP tools:

• ask starts a new advisory or workspace-agent job;
• ask_followup resumes a completed Claude session and forks a new branch;
• ask_status waits for progress or returns the final result;
• list_jobs lists recent jobs and recovers lost IDs;
• cancel_ask explicitly cancels a job and its process tree.

Jobs support a human-readable name, medium | high | xhigh | max effort (high by default), and an optional max_budget_usd ceiling.

Install in Codex

Add this Git repository as a marketplace and install the plugin:

codex plugin marketplace add AbsoluteMode/claude-ask
codex plugin add claude-ask@absolutmode

Start a new Codex task after installing or updating so the skill and MCP tool schemas are reloaded.

Requirements

• Codex with plugin support;
• Node.js 22 or newer;
• Claude Code on PATH or at ~/.local/bin/claude;
• an authenticated Claude Code session.

Access modes

Without workspace, Claude receives only the supplied question and runs in safe mode with no tools.

With an explicit absolute workspace, Claude runs as a full-access coding agent. Its default tools, shell, file editing, user/project instructions and hooks, network access, and configured MCP servers, skills, and plugins remain available. Interactive permission checks are bypassed because the detached process cannot answer prompts.

The workspace is Claude's working directory and intended task scope, not a hard operating-system sandbox. Only pass trusted workspaces and prompts.

Reliability and privacy

• Prompts travel over stdin, never argv, environment variables, state, or logs.
• Job directories use mode 0700; private files use mode 0600.
• Jobs survive MCP server restarts and remain discoverable through list_jobs.
• Boot-aware recovery avoids trusting reused PIDs after a machine restart.
• Cancellation terminates Claude's POSIX process group with SIGTERM → SIGKILL.
• Stderr is capped at 1 MiB; failures expose at most a 4 KiB diagnostic tail.
• There is no automatic elapsed-time or idle-time cancellation.
• Completed plugin job data is retained for 24 hours by default; resumable Claude sessions use Claude Code's normal session storage.

See the plugin documentation for the complete protocol and configuration reference.

Development

npm test
npm run check

The default suite uses a fake Claude executable and consumes no model usage. An authenticated paid/limited-usage smoke test is explicit:

npm run test:live

License

MIT