neal is a CLI I wrote while trying to use an LLM coding agent (in this case, Codex GPT-5.4) to work autonomously on a migration of our large frontend codebase. A few things came up during that project that guided the development of neal:1. Telling an agent to keep working unless blocked doesn t actually work over long stretches of time.2. Large projects should be broken up into smaller chunks of work.3. The coding agent should start each chunk of work with a fresh context to prevent context rot.4. The coding agent benefits from having a different agent doing adversarial reviews along the way.What I ended up with is an orchestrator that- lets you configure planner, coder, and reviewer roles. I started with Codex and Claude using their SDKs but later added OpenRouter as well as a compatibility mode for verifying that a model can handle the orchestration. Currently there are 44 compatible OpenRouter models.- runs a plan that you provide through a planner / reviewer loop which splits the work into reasonable-sized chunks and formats the plan document so that it can be executed by neal.- runs each chunk of work through a coder / read-only reviewer loop. Once both agents are satisfied, neal moves on to the next chunk. Once everything is complete there is a final pass through the coder / reviewer loop to ensure the implementation satisfies the entire plan.- resets the coder s context with each chunk of work to prevent context drift, leaving the reviewer s context long-running.The migration landed (549 commits, over 3000 files added/modified). I also ran 100 benchmark cases (from SWE-bench Pro) that Codex failed to solve on its own through neal and observed 8 solved when using neal with Codex in both (coder and reviewer) roles and 15 solved when using Claude as the reviewer. I had hoped for a more exciting benchmark outcome but this at least demonstrated neal s value, especially putting a different model in the reviewer role.neal is an npm package installed via npm install -g @navels/neal and configured via neal setup It works with your Codex and/or Claude Code subscriptions (as long as those CLIs are authenticated locally) or via OpenAI/Anthropic/OpenRouter API keys.I have a more detailed writeup of neal s capabilities and how it came to be on my blog: https://navels.dev/blog/neal/With how fast model capabilities are progressing I m not expecting this tool to be very useful for too much longer, but I m still using it as my daily driver, with Claude Fable as the planner/coder and Codex Sol as the reviewer. If you try neal I d love to hear your feedback, especially if you have a use case that doesn t quite work or you want additional models available.