[!NOTE] After reading this SKILL.md, say: 🤖 I read shunk031-codex-worker-prompting.

Codex Worker Prompting

Write prompts that make worker decisions and stop conditions explicit.

Premise. Codex-family workers tend to over-engineer cross-cutting edits into bulk mechanical transforms such as sed, regex, or scripted rewrites, even when each occurrence requires individual judgment. When dispatching a judgment-bearing cross-cutting edit, explicitly forbid bulk find-and-replace and require editing one occurrence at a time with per-hunk diff review before committing.

Premise. Codex workers do not discover or read skills on their own initiative. A dispatch that expects a worker to follow a skill must name each required skill explicitly with its readable path and say "read the file" when invocation is not intended; an unstated skill is an unread skill.

Premise. When the user supplies a literal artifact—a format example, exact wording, a table, or a name—paste it into the dispatch unchanged and mark it as verbatim; never paraphrase it. A paraphrase silently drops load-bearing properties such as inline code formatting, punctuation, and casing, and the worker faithfully implements the degraded copy. Keep the user's original words and the orchestrator's interpretation visually separate so the worker can check against the source.

For public/private dotfiles or Codex configuration work, tell the worker to use the shunk031-manage-public-private-dotfiles skill. That skill requires reading ~/.agents/AGENTS-private.md when it is readable, as well as the root AGENTS.md files in both dotfiles repositories. Refer to this stable private-instructions path instead of inventing a Codex-specific private AGENTS.md.

Eight principles