volley

Volley is a small bundle of Claude Code skills that lets OpenAI Codex CLI work alongside Claude in the same repository — planning, implementing, and reviewing each other's work — without either one trampling files the other is editing.

You stay in Claude. Codex shows up when you need it, leaves when it's done, and the two never write to the repo at the same time.

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Why

If you've ever:

• Wanted a second opinion on a plan before you commit to it
• Wanted Claude to review a PR diff that Claude itself wrote
• Watched Claude burn through 200K tokens on an implementation you could have offloaded to a cheaper model
• Wished you had git rebase --interactive for AI sessions

...you've hit the limits of single-assistant flows. Volley adds a second assistant with a hard lock so they collaborate instead of collide.

The flow

  Plan / PR review — fast, returns in seconds (over MCP)

    You + Claude  ──/volley:review-plan──▶  Codex reads the plan
    You + Claude  ◀──────── verdict ───────  and returns a critique
                                             (→ .volley/PLAN-REVIEW.md)

  Implementation — long-running, in a visible terminal

    You + Claude  ──/volley:implement───▶  Codex writes the code in
    (hands off, waits on the lock)          its own terminal tab and
    You + Claude  ◀──── STATE released ───  logs progress as it goes
    You + Claude  ──/volley:review-code──▶  Claude reviews the diff

A .volley/STATE file records which assistant is currently authoritative (ACTIVE=claude or ACTIVE=codex), a PID, and a timestamp. Every skill refuses to act unless the lock matches it. No race, no clobbered edits, no "wait, who wrote this?"

Quick start

# 1. Install the plugin
/plugin marketplace add Ryan-M-Frank/volley
/plugin install volley@volley
# If Codex tools aren't available yet: /reload-plugins (or restart), then:
/volley:setup

# 2. In a repo where you want to use it
cd my-project
claude  # start Claude Code

# 3. Inside Claude Code
/volley:setup           # one-time: confirms the bundled Codex MCP, scaffolds .volley/
/volley:status          # sanity-check the install

Once installed, the skills below are available in any repo.

Skills

Skill	What it does	Calls Codex via
/volley:setup	One-time: verifies Codex, confirms the bundled MCP is reachable, scaffolds .volley/	(smoke test)
/volley:status	Inspect the lock state, lock age, stale-PID detection	(local only)
/volley:unlock	Force-clear a stuck STATE lock (escape hatch)	(local only)
/volley:diagnose	Health-check: Codex CLI, MCP reachability, platform terminal, and lock state	(local only)
/volley:review-plan	Hand a plan document to Codex for review; output to .volley/PLAN-REVIEW.md	MCP (fast)
/volley:review-pr <num>	Hand a GitHub PR diff to Codex for review; output to .volley/PR-REVIEW-<num>.md	MCP (fast)
/volley:implement	Hand a plan to Codex; Codex runs in a visible terminal tab while Claude waits	Terminal spawn (long-running)
/volley:review-code	Claude reviews Codex's diff against the plan; output to .volley/CODE-REVIEW.md	(local; no Codex call)

Two transports for two latency profiles. Short ops (plan review, PR review) go through MCP and return in seconds. Long ops (implementation) spawn a visible Codex terminal so you can watch progress without blocking Claude's session.

Requirements

• Claude Code — the host environment
• Codex CLI >= 0.129, authenticated (codex login)
• Bash (Git Bash on Windows is fine)
• For /volley:implement only:
  • macOS: iTerm2 or Terminal.app
  • Linux: gnome-terminal or kitty (desktop), or tmux (headless / SSH)
  • Windows: Windows Terminal (wt) + Git Bash (cygpath)

Platform support