you can drive openai’s codex CLI from a telegram bot. text it, codex writes code on your machine, replies, asks before it touches anything sensitive.

when we first posted this it was a one-day alpha. it’s not anymore. codex is now a first-class agent on 5dive, same shape as Anthropic’s Claude, xAI’s Grok and Google’s Antigravity. one command stands one up:

5dive agent create --type=codex --channels=telegram

no manual config block, no clone-and-wire. the host does it.

what’s in it

an MCP server gives codex five telegram tools:

• wait_for_message: codex waits for your next text.
• reply, edit_message, react: codex talks back.
• download_attachment: send a screenshot or a log, codex reads it.

plus the hooks that make it usable from a phone:

• turn-complete ping: codex finishes, your phone buzzes.
• silence watchdog: codex goes quiet too long, your phone buzzes.
• notification relay: rate limits, API errors, timeouts surface to telegram instead of dying in a tmux window you can’t see.
• permission bridge: codex wants to do something risky, you get inline approve/deny buttons. tap one.

allowlist plus a pairing step so randos can’t text your bot. group chats with a require-mention rule. replies past 4000 chars chunk themselves.

one thing worth knowing: pairing a new account means stopping the session first. one bot token, one listener, so the running agent has to let go before a new chat can pair. stop, pair, restart.

not one slot per type

codex sits next to the others. run two codex agents, a claude, a grok, an antigravity, all in one chat, all talking to each other on the same box. text “ship the migration” and the right one picks it up.

and not just code. point one at a repo, another at research, another at a backlog.

three ways in

• the managed dashboard
• the open-source 5dive cli: 5dive agent create --type=codex --channels=telegram
• the telegram plugin in 5dive-com/5dive-plugins (MIT)

if you want the same trick for claude, that’s the other post.