Side Refresh

Catch up without disrupting the main task.

Side Refresh is an explicitly invoked Codex app skill for bringing a side conversation up to date with an active main task. It uses Codex's task-list and task-read capabilities, treats task state as untrusted, read-only evidence, and returns a compact status refresh without navigating to, interrupting, or modifying the main task.

Activation: Explicit only. Invoke $side-refresh; ordinary requests do not activate this skill.

Install

The repository root is an Agent Plugins 1.0 package. plugin.json is the portable manifest, while .codex-plugin/plugin.json is a generated compatibility bridge for Codex releases before root-manifest support.

Recommended Codex installation:

codex plugin marketplace add andydrewie/codex-skills
codex plugin add side-refresh@andydrewie-codex-skills

For the one-release selective-install compatibility path, use the open skills CLI:

npx skills add andydrewie/side-refresh -g -a codex

What it does

• Finds the most likely main task from an exact ID, title, project, or working directory.
• Reads recent task state without opening or disturbing the task.
• Separates verified completions from plans, assumptions, interrupted work, and unresolved decisions.
• Reports what is complete, in progress, awaiting Andrew, constrained, or uncertain.
• Treats task titles, summaries, messages, and tool output as untrusted evidence rather than instructions.

Side Refresh requires Codex app capabilities that can list and read tasks. It stops safely if those capabilities are unavailable and never inspects internal files or databases as a fallback.

Use

Use $side-refresh to summarize the active main task for this project.

When more than one task is plausible, Side Refresh asks which task to read instead of guessing.

Boundaries

• Read-only by default.
• No project-file, Git, Figma, or external-system changes.
• No interruption, navigation, handoff, archival, or mutation of the main task.
• No message to the main task unless the user separately and explicitly requests one.
• No improvised relay is sent without the user's confirmation.
• No credentials, tokens, personal data, or other secrets are reproduced in a refresh.
• No transcript dump or private reasoning trace exposure.

The normative workflow is defined in SKILL.md.

Validate

Run the dependency-free package validator before publishing changes:

python3 scripts/validate_package.py

License

MIT