Image generation from codex

[darrenoakey]

What feature would you like to see?

I am building new tools every day - and I don't think in the past decade or so I've ever needed to write a program and not needed a visual asset of some sort. Even a command line tool you want a nice banner on the readme.md you create... most apps need an icon or something - and once we get to a UI, especially a web ui - nowadays it should be full of hero images, icons, menus, borders, backgrounds, textures etc etc.

it's weird that codex can write the code, test it, deploy it, add commit messages etc - basically the entire dev platform apart from adding creating visual assets.

And if you think of what you have to do by hand to do it - even a simple banner image on a readme - you have to come up with an appropriate prompt and resolution - go to the chat ui - type it in, wait for an image, download it - move it to the right directory and rename it - change the readme to point to the file, and then add and commit it.

Seems like something an automated tool would be good at!!

I actually have a generate_image script that codex calls, but it uses mflux + krea - it works fine but it's slow and not as high quality as the native chatgpt image generation would be.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE add image generation using your image models to the tool.

Additional information

even worse than not having image generation - if you ask for an image - it goes off and produces some terrible thing created from code or svg or something.

also - the really nice to have would be image understanding as well - you want to be able to say "make a website to do blah - make it highly graphical with images on all the selectors, an appropriate background image and a hero image all in the same style... then take a screenshot with playwright - and have a look and verify that it's attractive and cohesive and everything is in the right place - if it isn't - fix it"

[senkushal90]

+1 on this.

As a private solo developer for my company, Codex has been a huge productivity boost for all the “small but constant” tasks — writing unit tests, CI tweaks, etc. The speed really adds up.

The biggest remaining obstacle for me is visual assets. Most images found online are copyright-restricted and not safe to drop into repos or products. Being able to generate original, license-safe images directly from the Codex CLI would be a massive win.
If Codex could generate icons, banners, UI assets, backgrounds, etc.…it would close one of the last gaps in the “end-to-end dev agent” story.

Right now, jumping out to ChatGPT UI or third-party tools breaks flow and automation. First-class image generation in Codex would be incredibly valuable, especially for solo devs and small teams shipping fast.

Strongly supporting this feature.

[etraut-openai]

I agree that this would be a cool integration feature.

As a short-term workaround, you can prompt Codex to use the OpenAI API to call the image generator directly. This requires you to use an OpenAI API Key for image generation, but it works quite well.