Codex Presence
A native macOS menu-bar utility that turns Codex lifecycle events into Discord Rich Presence—showing models, elapsed time, chats, and agents without polling or exposing private work.
View the build- Year
- 2026
- Role
- Solo product design & engineering
- Discipline
- Native macOS developer utility
- Stack
- Swift · AppKit · Codex Hooks · Discord IPC · Unix sockets
Codex Presence gives Discord the same at-a-glance activity layer developers expect from editor integrations, built specifically for Codex on macOS.
A lightweight AppKit menu-bar app listens to Codex lifecycle hooks over a local Unix socket, then publishes an allowlisted status to Discord through local IPC. It is event-driven, so idle work does not require polling.
What moved the work forward.
Context
Friends were using Discord Presence for VS Code, and I wanted the same ambient status for Codex. Waiting on another agent became the build window for the first version.
Build
I built a native Swift and AppKit menu-bar utility around ten Codex lifecycle hooks. Events travel through a local Unix socket and map into Discord Rich Presence through Discord's local IPC—no Electron shell and no background polling.
Outcome
The open-source app shows activity, model group, reasoning effort, elapsed time, active chats, and agents. Only bounded allowlisted metadata leaves the Mac; prompts, messages, tool output, and transcripts never do. Version 0.7.0 measured 0.0% idle CPU, about 13 MB physical footprint, and a 2.3 MB app bundle.
Product, interface and moments from the build.
