Claude Ask

Claude Ask is an open-source Codex plugin that runs a locally authenticated Claude Code model as an independent second opinion or full autonomous coding agent.

It provides five persistent asynchronous MCP tools:

• ask starts an advisory, read-only review, or workspace-agent job;

• ask_followup resumes a completed Claude session and forks a new branch;

• ask_status waits for progress or returns the final result;

• list_jobs lists recent jobs and recovers lost IDs;

• cancel_ask explicitly cancels a job and its process tree.

Jobs support a human-readable name, low | medium | high | xhigh | max effort (high by default), and an optional max_budget_usd ceiling.

Install in Codex

Add this Git repository as a marketplace and install the plugin:

codex plugin marketplace add AbsoluteMode/claude-ask
codex plugin add claude-ask@absolutmode

Start a new Codex task after installing or updating so the skill and MCP tool schemas are reloaded.

Related MCP server: claude-second-opinion-mcp

Requirements

• Codex with plugin support;

• Node.js 22 or newer;

• Claude Code on PATH or at ~/.local/bin/claude;

• an authenticated Claude Code session.

Access modes

Use a model alias or a full model ID such as claude-sonnet-5-5. The default is claude-opus-5, matching the existing personal installation.

With an absolute workspace, full mode: "agent" is the default for repository assistance, including implementation, investigation, and code reviews. Claude can run shell commands, inspect Git, edit files, and run tests. It inherits normal user/project instructions, hooks, network access, and configured MCP servers, skills, and plugins. Interactive permission prompts are bypassed because a detached job cannot answer them.

Without workspace, advisory mode receives only the question and has no tools.

mode: "review" is an optional restriction for an explicit read-only request. It exposes only Read, Glob, and Grep and disables shell, file writes, customizations, and MCP servers. It cannot run Git or tests. Follow-ups preserve the selected mode.

The workspace is Claude's working directory and intended task scope, not a hard operating-system sandbox. Only pass trusted workspaces and prompts.

Reliability and privacy

• Prompts travel over stdin, never argv, environment variables, state, or logs.

• Job directories use mode 0700; private files use mode 0600.

• Jobs survive MCP server restarts and remain discoverable through list_jobs.

• Boot-aware recovery avoids trusting reused PIDs after a machine restart.

• Cancellation terminates Claude's POSIX process group with SIGTERM → SIGKILL.

• Stderr is capped at 1 MiB; failures expose at most a 4 KiB diagnostic tail.

• There is no automatic elapsed-time or idle-time cancellation.

• Completed plugin job data is retained for 24 hours by default; resumable Claude sessions use Claude Code's normal session storage.

See the plugin documentation for the complete protocol and configuration reference.

Development

npm test
npm run check

The default suite uses a fake Claude executable and consumes no model usage. It checks exact model IDs, low effort, read-only review, inherited restrictions, and job recovery after an MCP server restart. An authenticated paid/limited-usage smoke test is explicit:

npm run test:live

License

MIT