Image Generation via the codex CLI

Overview

The codex CLI carries its own ChatGPT authentication and ships a built-in image tool, so any agent on this machine can generate images through it with no OPENAI_API_KEY and no other image service.

codex exec has no "write the image to this path" flag: it saves what it generates to $CODEX_HOME/generated_images/<session id>/. scripts/codex_image.py runs one non-interactive turn and collects only images saved under that run's exact session ID. If the session ID or its saved images are missing, it fails without writing output.

Always go through the script. A hand-rolled codex exec "draw me a cat" very often returns prose or an ImageMagick drawing instead of a generated image, and leaves you to find the output yourself.