A couple nights ago I watched a tutorial using Cursor to generate a technical tasks list file starting from a feature request, and then from this task list Cursor would iterate on the list, updating it as it went by checking off tasks and amending the file as needed. It seemed like something Codex could do so I’ve been playing around with the concept and I think it works well enough to share.
I’m sharing a base repo that contains AGENTS.md, and basic scaffolding for a React+vite+fastapi web application. In this set up you get Codex agent management of:
- Frontend/backend dependency management
- local application setup/startup script creation and maintenance
- codex sandbox environment script maintenance (you need to forward changes here to environment config, but Codex will request changes via this script)
- Project management in Codex:
- Codex will build a PRD file for you given background assets found in the prd-background folder, along with a survey of the current codebase.
- Codex will build and save a Task List File from a PRD file
- Codex will read the Task List File, decide which tasks it can commit to for the current session, then mark the tasks complete at the close of the task session.
- Once all tasks for a feature (a single PRD) are complete Codex can perform a final review and move the feature assets (PRD and Task List File) to the Closed directory.
PM actions are triggered by keyworkds defined in AGENTS.md. For instance, to pickup the next tasks in the Task List File, you just set up a task with the word ‘TaskMaster’, and the task starts…Codex pulls the task list file after environment is set and decides which tasks it will take and off it goes.
Here are some examples of the task-following; here I started with a brand new project (a web-based chat app) and an new task list (generated from a PRD file using the generate-tasks.md file in the repo shared below). Note in each task, all I submitted was the keyword ‘TaskMaster’:
Here is the repo: codex_bootstrap - dev_chat_with_tasks. This URL points to a dev branch that has a task list and PRD file already generated (but no code implementation) to implement a hypothetical LLM chat web client. Same starting point as the four task examples used above. The branch I’m committing changes to following these tasks is dev_chat_codex…which I’ll probably treat as a throw-away since I’m just trying to poke at the process for now.
The prompts for creating the PRD, tasks etc can also be run on a local IDE agent by adding them as context to your agent interaction, and for generating PRD and Task Lists it seems like using a reasoning model for those steps has produced better results for larger feature asks. BUT, you can do the whole thing entirely within Codex…drop prd-background files that explain your feature ask, then set off a task with the work ‘CreatePrd’…README.md explains it all.
Anyway, curious to see how other Codex folk are shaping their workflows and to compare and contrast so we can learn together.