Open Engine: A Shared Queue to Make Claude, ChatGPT & Codex Hand Off Work

Key Takeaways

• The bottleneck is the boundary, not the model. Claude and Codex don't do the same things, so you trade between them — the pain is the handoff: getting work to leave one tool with its sources and land with the right next agent or person, without anyone reading a giant transcript.
• A ticket beats a prompt. A prompt asks for an answer; a ticket asks for a result and carries owner, background, what the agent may do, where it must stop, and what it has to show when done — so multiple agents that don't know each other can collaborate through the ticket as their shared workspace.
• Five components. Open Engine is a Linear queue (chosen for its generous free plan; Jira or your own board also works) plus four skills that teach the AI the protocol: a setup skill, a status skill, a run-the-queue skill, and a smoke test. You can point OpenClaw or Hermes at the same skills.
• The claim-lock loop. An agent checks its assigned queue, claim-locks an eligible "agent-instructions" issue, moves it to agent working, leaves an "agent claimed" receipt, does the work locally, then moves the issue to done — so you can audit what happened instead of asking "did you do it?"
• Cross-provider, cross-team delegation. One person's Codex can write a self-contained issue and assign it to another person's Claude agent, which picks it up on its own heartbeat. If an agent hits ambiguity it moves the ticket to needs input and asks the exact blocking question rather than guessing — keeping the audit trail in one place.
• Smoke test first. The clean validation is to create an issue called "say hello," assign it to a human or agent with the instruction label, and confirm it can move to done — proving the interaction loop works before you load it with real work.