Codex Pets Get a Glow-Up — Minty Levels Up via Hatch Skill

OpenAI keeps quietly iterating on the Codex desktop app. The latest round is mostly housekeeping — refreshed navigation, tweaks to side chats, and assorted UI component polish — but the interesting part is Pets.

Pets landed back on May 2, 2026 as optional pixel-art companions that float above every window, mirroring what Codex is doing in the background and pinging you when a task finishes or needs input. Eight shipped by default; the Hatch skill (/pet in chat) lets you generate your own from an image or a text idea, writing a sprite sheet and pet.json manifest into ~/.codex/pets. Community pet directories appeared within hours of launch. Notably, the feature was blocked in the UK, EU, and Switzerland at rollout.

Now Hatch supports a much wider range of visual directions, meaning custom pets aren't locked to the original chibi house style — which is how a pet like Minty ends up looking meaningfully different from where it started. Alongside it, Codex has been absorbing config imports, auto-detecting rival agents' config files including Claude Code's CLAUDE.md.

Why it matters: coding agents are competing on personality and stickiness now, not just benchmark scores.