Summary

Make OpenClaw sessions a first-class interactive surface in the official Codex plugin, including browsing, creating, reading, messaging, stopping, archiving, and restoring sessions.

Problem to solve

The official @openclaw/codex integration runs Codex through OpenClaw, but it does not currently give the Codex desktop app a useful OpenClaw session surface. A separate prototype can show Gateway health as a global plugin page, but that is not the user goal: people need their OpenClaw sessions, agent identity, live state, transcript, and composer where they already work in Codex.

The missing bridge also tempts integrations to parse OpenClaw config, vendor a Gateway client, expose raw session keys, or duplicate connection lifecycle. Those approaches drift quickly and risk leaking channel identifiers or internal transcript content.

Proposed solution

• Extend the canonical openclaw mcp serve bridge with capability-detected session operations for list, history, create, send, abort, and safe session updates.
• Keep one persistent Gateway connection and use the existing Gateway session RPCs rather than adding another protocol.
• Project sessions through opaque IDs, expose only user/assistant visible text, bound output sizes, and return fixed safe errors.
• Add dual-format Codex plugin metadata to extensions/codex so the published @openclaw/codex package can be installed directly as a Codex plugin.
• Ship one responsive MCP App that uses master/detail navigation on current Codex builds and detail-only navigation when the host supplies a native session sidebar collection.
• Show Working, Recent, and Archived groups; agent image/emoji/initial fallbacks; unread and run state; a transcript/composer; stop; archive/restore; and a compact Gateway status/diagnostics control.
• Hide controls that the connected Gateway does not advertise or the granted operator scope cannot perform.

Alternatives considered

1. Keep a Gateway-health dashboard as the primary page. It is useful diagnostics, but not an everyday session workflow.
2. Vendor a generated Gateway client and parse openclaw.json inside a separate Codex-only repository. This duplicates the supported MCP bridge and becomes stale as OpenClaw changes.
3. Wait for a native Codex sidebar API before shipping. The MCP App can provide a useful master/detail experience now and progressively adopt host-native collections later.
4. Merge this with Make Codex supervision interactive and owned by the Codex plugin #103235. That issue covers the opposite direction—OpenClaw supervising Codex sessions—so combining them would blur runtime ownership and make both changes much harder to review.

Impact

• Affected: OpenClaw users who also use the Codex desktop app.
• Severity: the current integration is diagnostic/read-only for this workflow and does not support normal session work.
• Frequency: every time a user wants to continue an OpenClaw conversation from Codex.
• Consequence: users switch products or build brittle local integrations instead of using the official plugin.

Evidence/examples

• openclaw mcp serve already owns OpenClaw config resolution, Gateway authentication, connection lifecycle, and live subscription behavior.
• Gateway already exposes the required session list, history, create, send, abort, subscribe, and patch operations.
• extensions/codex already owns the published official Codex integration, so the bundle belongs there rather than in a new repository.
• Make Codex supervision interactive and owned by the Codex plugin #103235 is complementary work for interactive Codex supervision from OpenClaw.

Additional information

The host-native sidebar collection is an additive optimization. The global master/detail MCP App remains the compatibility path for Codex versions that do not understand the collection contribution.