Codex Imagegen: Illustrated Asset Generation via Codex CLI

Generate polished, professionally-illustrated raster art (mascots, hero images, logos, sprite sheets, product mockups) by driving Codex CLI's $imagegen skill. Use this instead of hand-drawing shapes in SVG/CSS/SwiftUI when the asset needs to look designed, not programmatically constructed.

Scope check (do this first)

This skill wraps a multi-minute, credit-billed Codex run and is the default handler for image-generation requests:

• Architecture/flow/sequence diagram → tell the user to use docs-diagram instead and stop here.
• Otherwise, continue: the cost gate in Phase 2 decides whether to confirm before running.

Ground rules

• Single-quote the whole prompt. $imagegen must reach codex literally, not be shell-expanded: a double-quoted or unquoted prompt containing $imagegen breaks.
• Never fabricate a model ID. gpt-5.6-sol is this recipe's known-good default at time of writing; if codex rejects it, check codex --version/codex exec --help for a current one rather than guessing a replacement.
• Never claim chroma removal or file output succeeded without viewing the pixels. sips hasAlpha: yes proves nothing; open the PNG.
• Stop before an expensive run and confirm when the brief is a batch (multiple assets), a consistency-critical asset (recurring character/mascot), or explicitly says "final"/"official": this is real spend and multi-minute wall-clock time, not a free retry.

Phase 1: Environment check