A chess break during your work
Install and enable Pawn Break to have Codex open a chess puzzle automatically at the start of each task, including short questions. Its skill requires no separate chess request. Play legal moves, use a hint, retry or move to the next puzzle.
Progress stays locally in the widget. Start at rating 1500; five unassisted solves raise difficulty by 100, up to 2500. Assisted or skipped puzzles reset the streak.
Public puzzles come from the Lichess CC0 dataset and a bounded shared cache. If Lichess is unavailable, reserve puzzles remain usable. A server outage prevents fetching new puzzles; your current board stays usable.
Automatic opening follows the skill through the agent rather than a lifecycle hook. Ask Codex to stop automatic opening in the current chat; explicitly ask to open Pawn Break to resume. Disable the plugin to stop automatic opening across chats. Closing or switching chats does not save a pause. When the agent sends completion for an automatic board, it shows Getting back to the chat… for 1.5 seconds and requests closure. Explicitly opened boards stay open. Interrupted work or unsupported closure can leave the board open for manual dismissal. Inline is supported; other display modes depend on your host. Local progress may not transfer across chats, devices or hosts.