🧑‍🍳 sous-chef

Fable 5 orchestrates and reviews; GPT-5.5 or GLM 5.2 implements. Your head chef doesn't chop onions.

A Claude Code plugin that splits coding between two frontier models the way a kitchen splits work. Fable plans, writes the ticket, reviews every diff line by line, and re-runs the checks itself. Codex or GLM do the implementation, with no say over what ships. The split is economic: Fable is the most expensive model on the line, so its tokens go to judgment and Codex or GLM tokens go to bulk. In the measured setup this pattern is built on, Codex did ~20x the implementation work per orchestration round trip, and two mid-tier subscriptions often beat one top-tier one.

What it looks like

> /sous-chef:serve migrate the auth module off the deprecated session API

Claude   "Full serve at gpt-5.5: implement, cross-review, fix, verify.
         2-3 Codex runs, ~15-45 min. I'll report when it's plated."
Claude   writes the ticket - files to touch, files NOT to touch, done-when
         criteria, verification commands - and fires it (background)
Codex    implements. 11 files changed. Claims "all tests pass."
Claude   reviews the diff line by line, re-runs pnpm test + tsc itself
Codex    cross-reviews the diff read-only; 3 findings
Claude   validates them against the code: 2 confirmed, 1 refuted
Claude   refires the 2 confirmed findings as a scoped fix ticket
Claude   re-verifies each finding at its cited location; checks green
Claude   "Served: auth migration, 11 files, 42 tests pass, 2 review
         findings fixed, 1 refuted. Two models agree; plate's yours."

One command in, one plated result out. Codex saying "tests pass" is a sentence; pnpm test output is a fact - Claude re-runs everything itself.

Two commands

/sous-chef:serve is for task-shaped work, done end to end: implement, cross-review, fix the findings, verify. One announcement up front, one report at the end, a hard budget of five Codex runs in between. This is the daily driver.

/sous-chef:simmer is for goal-shaped work, looped until a command passes: "make the suite green", "get the benchmark under 200ms". A fresh Codex run each lap, Claude judging every lap with real command output, on a dedicated branch, with lap caps and no-progress detection. The worker never grades its own homework.

Rule of thumb: serve a task, simmer a goal. If a serve runs out of budget and what remains is goal-shaped, it offers to continue as a simmer.

À la carte, when you want to drive the stations yourself:

Install

Requirements: Codex CLI ≥ 0.134, authenticated (codex login - a ChatGPT subscription is enough; no API key needed).

/plugin marketplace add tomascupr/sous-chef
/plugin install sous-chef@sous-chef

(sous-chef@sous-chef is plugin@marketplace - same name for both here.) Then, inside a repo:

/sous-chef:mise

/mise is idempotent - re-run it anytime as a health check, and after a plugin update to refresh the installed profile.

How the split works

you ── "/sous-chef:serve migrate auth" ──▶ CLAUDE (head chef)
                                              │ ticket: files ±, done-when,
                                              │ verification commands
                                              ▼
            ┌────────────────────────────────────────────┐
            │ codex exec --profile sous-chef             │  background;
            │ workspace-write sandbox · approvals off    │  no session memory;
            │ reads AGENTS.md · implements the ticket    │  hard boundary
            └───────────────────┬────────────────────────┘
                                ▼ diff
            CLAUDE reviews + re-runs verification itself
                                ▼
            CODEX cross-reviews read-only ──▶ CLAUDE validates findings
                                ▼
            confirmed findings refired once ──▶ verified ──▶ served

Soft routing, not hard blocks. A routing policy in CLAUDE.md plus skills that make delegation the path of least resistance. Claude still edits directly for small surgical fixes - hard-blocking Edit/Write provably makes agents route around the block instead. Manual routing is the default - you trigger the skills, and Claude offers them when they fit. Autonomous routing lets Claude invoke serve, fire, taste, and refire itself by task shape, announcing in one line before every delegation; simmer stays explicit-ask; choose the mode in /mise, and switch by re-running it. The boundary that IS hard: delegated Codex runs execute in a workspace-write sandbox with approvals off, and Codex reviews run read-only. (The optional GLM Claude-worker route has no OS sandbox underneath; its docs say to treat it accordingly - trusted repos or a branch/worktree only.)

One source of truth for standards. Repo conventions live in AGENTS.md, which Codex re-reads on every run - including non-interactive codex exec. Claude reads the same file via an @AGENTS.md import in CLAUDE.md. Per-task instructions travel on the ticket; standing orders stay in the file.

Background always, polling never. Delegated runs execute via run_in_background so the Bash timeout ceiling can't kill them mid-job, and completion re-invokes Claude.

Claims are not evidence. After every delegated run, Claude reviews the diff line by line and re-runs the verification commands itself.

The receipts

Every load-bearing decision traces to a documented incident, an official doc, or a measured comparison - not vibes. A sample:

• Why background-always: a single polling loop against a running Codex job burned 27% of a weekly Claude quota in ~12 hours producing nothing (anthropics/claude-code#54143).
• Why soft routing, not blocking Edit/Write: an agent, blocked three times by a hook, routed around it with a Python file-write via Bash (anthropics/claude-code#29709). A hard block that can't hold is worse than an honest routing policy.
• Why findings get validated: in a 20-review field test, ~3 of 20 Codex reviews failed silently, and adversarial mode flagged missing circuit breakers on a 500-line cron script.

Full sources for these and every other decision: docs/design.md.

FAQ

How is this different from OpenAI's official codex plugin? Three deliberate divergences, each with receipts in docs/design.md: (1) no stop-time review gate - OpenAI's own README warns it "can create a long-running Claude/Codex loop and may drain usage limits quickly"; here, review runs inside a pass you explicitly ordered, under a hard run budget, not on every stop. (2) findings get validated against the actual code before you see them - raw cross-model reviews over-flag, and validation filters the false positives. (3) /simmer fills a gap neither the official plugin nor ralph-loop covers: a delegated implementer inside the loop with an independent judge outside it.

What does this cost me? Two subscriptions: any Claude plan for Claude Code, and a ChatGPT plan for Codex - codex login, no API key needed. Subscription auth is the first-class path for headless runs: codex exec reuses the saved login, tokens auto-refresh even mid-run, and fire unsets the two env vars (CODEX_API_KEY, CODEX_ACCESS_TOKEN) that could silently switch a run to per-token billing. Delegation overhead is ~5-7k Claude tokens per round trip, which is why small tasks stay with Claude.

What do I see while it cooks? An announcement first: what was delegated, the expected duration (typically 5-20+ minutes per Codex run at high reasoning effort), and the log path. You keep working; Claude is re-invoked when the job exits. Cancel anytime - Claude kills the job and shows you any partial changes to keep or revert.

Does Claude stop writing code? No. Small fixes, prototypes, and anything design-ambiguous stay with Claude - the routing rules themselves say so. Delegation is announced, never silent - in both routing modes.

Which models? Whatever your ~/.codex/config.toml says - the shipped profile pins only sandbox and approval policy. Recommended: gpt-5.5 with model_reasoning_effort = "xhigh". GLM-5.2 ships as an opt-in second implementer ("fire with GLM"): it slightly out-benchmarks GPT-5.5 on SWE-bench Pro at a fraction of the per-token price, though ~3.3x more token-hungry. Two routes as templates (GLM Coding Plan via a headless Claude worker, or OpenRouter through Codex); /mise sets up whichever key you have. On the Claude side it's model-agnostic; built for and dogfooded with Fable 5.

Why not MCP? Plain codex exec over Bash gives you the sandbox flag, the exit code, stdin for prompts, and background execution with no extra moving parts. That is why sous-chef uses a thin wrapper instead of a persistent MCP server.

Windows? The snippets are POSIX; under Claude Code's Git Bash they should work, but this is dogfooded on macOS.

What's in the box

skills/serve/         the autonomous pipeline: fire, taste, refire, verify, report
skills/simmer/        the loop: Codex works, Claude judges, until the goal passes
skills/fire/          delegation skill + ticket template + GLM routes
skills/taste/         cross-review skill + review prompt template
skills/refire/        fix skill: confirmed findings become a scoped fix run
skills/mise/          setup skill
codex/                Codex profiles → ~/.codex/ (sous-chef default, sous-chef-glm)
templates/            AGENTS.md scaffold, CLAUDE.md routing blocks (manual + autonomous), GLM worker config
docs/design.md        the receipts: sources for every design decision

Uninstall

/plugin uninstall sous-chef removes the skills (and /plugin marketplace remove sous-chef the registration). If you ran /mise, it may also have created (remove by hand if you're done with them):

• ~/.codex/sous-chef.config.toml and ~/.codex/sous-chef-glm.config.toml
• ~/.sous-chef/glm-claude/ (isolated GLM worker config)
• a "Division of labor (sous-chef, ...)" routing block (manual or autonomous variant) appended to ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md
• an AGENTS.md scaffold and/or @AGENTS.md import line in repos you set up (these are yours now - they're useful regardless of the plugin)

Contributing

Field reports welcome - especially Windows, and especially receipts that contradict docs/design.md; it's meant to be corrected.

License

MIT © Tomas Cupr