ECX, Piece by Piece: The Seven Parts of My Claude Code and Codex Setup

A developer packaged a seven-part daily-use setup for Claude Code and Codex into an installable tool called ECX (everything claude codex), built around a shared Obsidian Markdown vault that both agents read as memory. The setup uses SessionStart and post-compact hooks to inject recent notes, a standard-library Python hook called agent-sync that passes each agent the other's latest session messages, and a guard that blocks agents from declaring a task done while tests are failing.

The whole setup on one screen. This post walks through every circle. I've used Claude Code and Codex every day for six months. Out of the box, they're two brilliant strangers. Neither knows what I'm working on until I tell it, neither knows what the other one did an hour ago, and both will happily tell me a task is "done" while the tests are red. So I kept adding pieces. A folder of notes they both read. A hook that passes each one the other's latest messages. A search engine over everything I've written. A guard that won't let them finish with failing tests. Eventually the pieces became one thing, and I packaged it as ECX https://saksham.digital/ecx everything claude codex so anyone can install it in one line. This post goes through all seven parts in depth: what each one does, how it works under the hood, and what it changes day to day. Every screenshot below is a real recording. I installed ECX fresh for a demo user called Maya so none of my own notes show up. Projects, deadlines, hard rules. Both agents read it before you type. Everything in ECX sits on top of one idea: your notes live in a single folder of plain Markdown files, the vault, and the agents treat that folder as their memory. inbox/ drop anything here, sort it later daily/ one note per day projects/ what you're building and where each thing stands personal/ people, opportunities, applications, resume research/ deep dives and playbooks wiki/ clean, linked articles compiled from raw notes content/ drafts, a queue, a published log archive/ finished work. Nothing is ever deleted, only moved It's an Obsidian vault, so you get the graph view, backlinks and every Obsidian plugin for free. It's also just files in git, so nothing locks you in. If you stop using ECX tomorrow, your notes are still a normal folder. One rule runs the whole thing: capture first, organize later. Anything new goes into inbox/ . You never decide where something belongs while you're capturing it. An agent files it later, and /wiki compiles piles of raw captures into clean linked articles Karpathy's LLM-wiki idea , then moves the originals to archive/ . A folder of notes on its own is a library nobody reads. What makes it a second brain is a small memory layer that the agent loads before you say anything: hot.md recent.md and the daily files hold the last few days, so a new session knows what you did yesterday. A SessionStart hook injects all of this before your first message. A second hook refreshes it after every /compact , which is when long sessions usually lose their context. At the end of a session, /tldr writes back whatever changed. You stop opening sessions with three paragraphs of background. I open Claude Code, type "what's on my plate this week?", and get an answer built from my own deadlines and open loops, not a guess. A brand-new Claude Code session. It has never seen this conversation before, but it has read the vault, so it knows the demo date, the eval deadline, the parse tide bug and the reply Maya owes Priya. It also lists something that isn't in Maya's notes at all: the demo moved to Friday. That's the next part. Tell Codex something. Claude already knows. Claude Code and Codex come from two different labs. Each keeps its own chat history, and neither can read the other's. If you use both, you're the glue: you copy context between terminals and re-explain whatever the other agent just figured out. Both agents write every conversation to session files on disk: Claude Code under ~/.claude/projects/ , Codex under ~/.codex/sessions/ . agent-sync is a single Python file standard library only, nothing to install that runs as a hook before every message you send to either agent: The first message of a session looks back six hours, so a fresh session catches up on what happened today. After that, it's a running diff. Codex voice transcripts are included, so you can talk to Codex out loud and then type to Claude. The agents can also message each other directly. sync.py send --from claude --to codex "..." leaves mail that shows up in the other agent's next turn, with a rate limit so two agents can't ping-pong forever. Every message is logged to agents/AGENT CHAT.md , a readable file you can open in Obsidian. Maya tells Codex about a schedule change. Codex reads the vault's hard rules, notes the change, and replies "Saved for Claude". Then she opens a brand-new Claude Code session and asks about her week. Claude's answer the screenshot in part 1 says: "Lena moved it from Thu 11:00, and it now has to run on the v2 buoy feed. Your notes still say Thu 11:00." Nobody passed that on by hand. Claude even caught that the notes were now stale. By meaning, links and images. Re-indexed every night. Plain text search finds words. Your memory doesn't work in words. You remember "that note about latency" or "the slide with the architecture diagram", and grep can't find either. ECX ships three search engines over the vault, each exposed to the agents as an MCP server: A small router server looks at each question and sends it to the right engine, so the agent doesn't have to guess. A nightly job re-indexes everything while you sleep. Two pieces keep it honest: One privacy note, straight from the FAQ: meaning search and image search run entirely on your machine. The relationship graph uses Ollama, and its default model runs on Ollama's free cloud, so note text is sent there while indexing. Set ECX LLM MODEL to a local model if you want everything on your laptop. Failing tests send it back. Dangerous commands blocked. Agents are optimistic. They'll change one file, skip the test run, and announce they're finished. ECX adds hooks that check the work before the agent is allowed to stop. When Claude Code or Codex tries to finish, a Stop hook runs your tests first: test script, pytest, unittest with a tests/ folder, cargo, go, or a Makefile test: target. You can set it per repo in .ecx/test-command , or write off there. Both agents send the same payload when they try to stop, so one script covers Claude Code and Codex. Maya asked for "a quick one, no need to run the tests". Claude skipped them. The hook didn't. Sent back with the failure, Claude worked out that the old test encoded the bug, fixed it, and both tests pass. A PreToolUse hook reads every shell command before it runs. It blocks rm -rf ~ , disk formats and fork bombs outright, and asks before force-pushes, git reset --hard and DROP TABLE . This matters more than it sounds: many popular guards check a variable Claude Code never sets, so they block nothing. ECX's guard is tested against the real hook payload. It's strict enough that it blocked me while I was making this post's diagram, because the illustration's text contained rm -rf ~ . doctor runs 16+ checks across hooks, indexes, scheduled jobs and sync. It also runs at the start of every Claude Code and Codex session: silent when everything is healthy, a short warning with the exact fix when something isn't. Doctor checks every part. Green means silent at session start. There's also an AI-tell guard: after you write anything in content/ or personal/ , it warns about em dashes and stock AI phrases from a word list you can edit. It never blocks, it just tells you before you publish. 18 included. Rewrite them or add your own. A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file: plain instructions for one job, plus any scripts it needs. You type /daily and the agent follows that file. Because skills are just Markdown, you change one by editing text. No code, no build step. ECX ships 18, and most of them work on top of the vault: | Skill | What it does | |---|---| | /boot | A 30-second briefing at the start of a session | | /daily , /weekly | Start the day or review the week from your trackers | | /opps | Your opportunity pipeline, with deadline and eligibility checks before anything is shown as actionable | | /outreach , /email | Networking with a paper trail of who you contacted and when | | /content , /brand | A content machine that drafts in your voice and keeps a queue | | /resume | Resume changes, always asking first | | /catchup | Reads another window's full session so you can continue it | | /ship | Commits, pushes and shows proof it landed | | /tldr | Saves the session to the vault and updates hot.md | | /wiki , /wiki-health | Compiles the inbox into linked articles, and finds stubs, orphans and broken links | | /video-notes | Turns a video into key frames and a transcript, then notes | | /project , /summary , /money | Load a project's context, summarize progress, track income ideas | The skills that matter most are the ones you write yourself. Mine started as the ones in this table and grew into dozens: a competition playbook, a course tracker, a content calendar. Copy a skill, change its instructions to match how you work, and it's yours. Skills are linked into both ~/.claude/skills and ~/.agents/skills , so Codex gets the same ones. Ask or capture a note with your laptop shut. This one surprises people the most. With my MacBook closed in my bag, I can open the Claude app or the ChatGPT app on my phone, ask "what's due this week?", and get an answer from my own notes. I can say "I met Adi, he's at X, we talked about Y" and it lands in my vault. There's no server and no new app. The bridge is a private GitHub repo: context/ folder: AGENTS.md has a "phone mode" section. inbox/ , touch nothing else, and push it. Because the phone only ever adds one file to inbox/ and never edits memory directly, the two sides can't overwrite each other. The two phone apps differ in a couple of small ways. The Claude app reads CLAUDE.md on its own and pushes captures straight away. Codex in the ChatGPT app needs a one-time setup connect the GitHub app to just the vault repo, create a Codex Cloud environment with internet off , you start each chat with "Read AGENTS.md first and follow section 7", and it asks once before publishing a capture to your repo. The README walks through both. They argue with evidence. Risky steps wait for you. The first six parts make each agent better on its own and keep them in sync. ecx duo puts them on the same problem at the same time. cd your-repo && ~/ecx/bin/ecx duo "make the failing login test pass" Both agents start on the goal, on a fresh branch, and a local page opens with one chat where you watch them work. Nobody is in charge. They split the work themselves, and they're told to push back instead of agreeing to be polite. A blind round first. Each agent writes its own plan without seeing the other's. Then they critique each other's plans and merge the best of both. You see both takes side by side. Blind drafts. Neither saw the other's plan before writing its own. You approve the plan before anything gets built. Nothing is written until you click Approve. The merged plan waits for you. They argue with evidence. An objection has to come with a reason you can check: a failing call, a test, a source. And neither agent can call the task done until it has re-checked the other's latest changes. A real objection from a real run: Codex found a crash with build metadata, and Claude fixed it with the exact calls that now pass. Risky actions wait for you as cards: deleting or replacing files that existed before, git push and other history changes, publishing, deploying, sending data out, any tool call that isn't a plain read, and any tool duo doesn't recognize. Folders you list as protected are blocked outright. Even after "yes, push it", the push still shows as a card until it's approved. You can talk to one agent @codex try the smaller fix or both, and pause, resume or stop at any time. A High button switches both to their top models mid-run, and a meter shows each agent's usage limits. Duo pauses itself at 90%. The report has two parts: the agents' own summary, and an action log duo writes from the raw events, which the agents can't edit. Every command, every card and your answer to it, with the risky ones listed first. I ran it on six of the hardest issues in SWE-bench Verified https://www.swebench.com/ rated "1-4 hours" for a human , graded by the official harness: | | Claude Code alone | Codex alone | ecx duo | |---|---|---|---| | Issues resolved | 2/6 | 2/6 | 3/6 | Duo solved every issue that either agent solved alone, and neither agent alone got all of those. Six issues with one run each is a first signal, not proof, and the script to rerun it is in the repo. The honest limits: duo judges each command and tool call, not what a script does after it starts running, so a script an agent writes and runs is only as safe as your review of the plan. It always works on its own branch, and every action is in the log. git clone https://github.com/saksham10arora-dotcom/everything-claude-codex ~/ecx cd ~/ecx && ./install.sh It asks two questions where your notes live, and your first name and wires everything in. A real install for the demo user. Everything is merged into existing settings, never overwritten. It never overwrites your config. It merges into existing settings, skips anything already there, and saves a .ecx-bak copy of every file it touches. --dry-run lists every change without making any, and --uninstall restores the backups. Add --with-search --with-cron --with-phone for the full stack. You don't need both agents. Everything except agent-sync and duo works with Claude Code alone. None of these parts is magic on its own. A notes folder, a hook, a search index, a test runner. The value is that they're wired together, so the agents stop being clever strangers and start working like a team that knows you: they remember your situation, they know what the other one did, they can find anything you've written, they can't fake being finished, and they keep working when your laptop is shut. ECX is free and open source. It runs on the Claude Code and Codex logins you already have. More of my writing and projects at saksham.digital https://saksham.digital .