Codex Now Imports Your Claude Code Setup — And It's Built Right Into Onboarding
OpenAI's latest Codex update adds guided migration from Claude Code and Claude Cowork, plus a revamped plugins screen with filters and keyboard navigation.
If you’ve been putting off switching to Codex because rebuilding your entire Claude Code setup from scratch felt like a Friday afternoon you’d rather not have, OpenAI has addressed that directly. The latest Codex app update adds guided migration flows that pull in your configuration from Claude Code and Claude Cowork, including at first launch during onboarding. It also ships a substantially revamped plugins screen.
This is a focused, practical update. Here’s what it actually does.
The Migration Flow
Open Settings in the Codex desktop app and click “Import other agent setup.” Codex scans your machine for Claude Code configurations and migrates what it can automatically. That includes:
- Skills and hooks
- MCP servers
- Subagents and instruction files
- Up to 30 days of session history
Your CLAUDE.md instruction files can become AGENTS.md files in Codex. Project configurations and folder structures carry over where the concepts map cleanly between the two tools.
For anything that can’t be handled automatically, Codex opens a follow-up thread where an AI walks you through the remaining pieces. There’s also a new /import CLI command if you prefer to handle this selectively from the terminal.
What Doesn’t Transfer
Two categories of things require manual attention after import:
MCP servers with custom auth or environment variables. API keys and env vars don’t transfer for security reasons. You’ll need to re-enter them after the import completes, but Codex flags exactly which ones need attention.
Hooks that use Claude-only events. Some hook triggers in Claude Code have no equivalent in Codex. These get flagged for manual review rather than silently dropped.
Also worth knowing if you’ve built complex multi-agent orchestration in Claude Code: those patterns don’t map cleanly to Codex’s agent system. The migration tool is genuinely useful for most setups, but it’s not a magic wand for highly customised Claude-native architectures.
The Revamped Plugins Screen
Alongside migration, the plugins screen has been rebuilt. The main changes are:
- Separate tabs for installed plugins versus the marketplace
- Category and marketplace filters so you’re not scrolling through everything to find what you need
- Keyboard navigation throughout
- Clearer install actions and more reliable state refresh after installation or removal
- Support for workspace plugins alongside user-level plugins
- The ability to upload a new version of an already-shared plugin without changing its access link
If you’ve been managing more than a handful of plugins, the previous screen was functional but cluttered. This reorganisation is a meaningful quality-of-life improvement.
Other Changes in This Update
A few smaller but useful additions:
- Expanded Settings search now covers more panels, including Git settings
- The goal timer no longer overlaps in narrow layouts
- Review diff ordering stays consistent with the file tree
- Window rendering improvements for systems without translucent backdrop support, including Windows 10
- The embedded V8 toolchain updated to rusty_v8 149.2.0
What This Means for You
The practical context here matters. A number of developer teams have been looking at Codex more seriously recently, partly because of session limits and rate limiting on Claude Code, and partly because Codex runs on a ChatGPT subscription many developers are already paying for. The blocker has often been the migration cost, not the tool itself.
This update removes most of that friction. If your Claude Code setup is reasonably standard, you can import it during your first Codex session and be working in the new environment the same day. The onboarding integration is particularly well-considered: rather than burying the import in a settings menu you’d have to go hunting for, it surfaces the option when you’re most likely to need it.
The plugins overhaul matters separately. As Codex’s plugin ecosystem has grown, discoverability has become a real issue. Filters and tabs are table-stakes features for a marketplace at this scale, and keyboard navigation suggests the team is thinking about the kind of power users who are most likely to be switching from a competing tool.
One note on “Claude Cowork,” which appears in the official changelog alongside Claude Code. This doesn’t correspond to a standard Anthropic product name, and may refer to a third-party tool or an internal designation. The migration support for it is real and documented by OpenAI; it’s just worth being aware that it’s a less widely recognised name than Claude Code.
If you’re on ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, Edu, or Enterprise, Codex is already included in your plan. The import documentation covers the full details of what transfers and what to expect from the process.