Phone a Friend

phone-a-friend is a CLI orchestration layer for AI coding agents. Relay tasks to any backend, spin up multi-model teams, or run persistent multi-agent sessions.

Mode	What it does	Best for
Relay	One-shot delegation to Codex, Gemini, Ollama, Claude, or OpenCode	Quick second opinions, code reviews, analysis
Team	Iterative multi-backend refinement over N rounds	Collaborative review, converging on a solution
Agentic	Persistent multi-agent sessions with @mention routing	Autonomous collaboration, adversarial review, deep analysis

Host parity

Feature	Claude Code	OpenCode	Codex
/phone-a-friend (single + parallel multi-backend relay)	✓	✓	✓
/curiosity-engine (Q&A rally)	✓	✓	✓
/phone-a-team (iterative multi-model team)	✓	—	✓
Plugin marketplace install	✓	—	✓
CLI plugin install (phone-a-friend plugin install --<host>)	✓	✓	✓
Skill auto-discovery	✓	✓	✓
Recursion guard (PHONE_A_FRIEND_HOST=<host>)	n/a	✓	✓

Claude /phone-a-team orchestrates rounds via the Agent Teams primitive (TeamCreate + Task + SendMessage). Codex /phone-a-team is pure Bash orchestration directly from the skill body, with Codex's own model handling the synthesis between rounds. OpenCode has no comparable primitive and replicates /phone-a-team by running repeated /phone-a-friend calls manually.

[!IMPORTANT] Codex users: Codex's default workspace-write sandbox blocks subprocess access to the macOS Keychain (where Claude stores OAuth tokens) and OAuth refresh network paths (Gemini). With the default sandbox, relays to Claude fail with a misleading Not logged in and Gemini hangs until the timeout. Two workarounds today, both with tradeoffs:

Option A — Lower the sandbox. Per-session (preferred): launch Codex with codex --sandbox danger-full-access. Persistent (convenient but removes sandbox protections from every Codex session, not just PaF relays): add an alias to ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc:

alias codex='codex --sandbox danger-full-access'

Option B — Use API keys. Skips OAuth entirely, works in any sandbox:

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=...
export GEMINI_API_KEY=...

A portable-auth path via claude setup-token is planned for the Claude side. Gemini OAuth refresh inside the sandbox is a separate open issue with no planned fix yet — until then, Option B is the only Gemini-safe path that keeps the sandbox intact.

Quick Start

Prerequisites: Node.js 22.13+ and at least one backend:

• Claude Code
• Codex CLI
• Gemini CLI
• Ollama
• OpenCode

Install:

npm install -g @freibergergarcia/phone-a-friend
phone-a-friend    # first run shows a guided menu — choose Setup

The setup wizard detects your backends, offers to install detected host integrations, and verifies everything works.

Claude Code marketplace (commands and skills only):

/plugin marketplace add freibergergarcia/phone-a-friend
/plugin install phone-a-friend@phone-a-friend-marketplace

To update: /plugin marketplace update phone-a-friend-marketplace then /plugin update phone-a-friend@phone-a-friend-marketplace.

[!NOTE] Marketplace install ships only the slash commands and skills. For the full CLI (agentic mode and TUI), install via npm install -g @freibergergarcia/phone-a-friend.

OpenCode commands and skills:

If you use OpenCode, install the same Phone-a-Friend skills plus thin slash-command shims into your OpenCode config:

phone-a-friend plugin install --opencode