26 ms·

OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal

516 points by mfiguiere 2y ago

swyx 2y ago
related demo/intro video: https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/1912556874211422572 https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/1912556874211422572 this is a direct answer to claude code which has been shipping furiously: https://x.com/_catwu/status/1903130881205977320 https://x.com/_catwu/status/1903130881205977320 and is not open source; there are unverified comments that they have DMCA'ed decompilations https://x.com/vikhyatk/status/1899997417736724858?s=46 https://x.com/vikhyatk/status/1899997417736724858?s=46 by total coincidence we're releasing our claude code interview later this week that touches on a lot of these points + why code agent CLIs are an actually underrated point in the SWE design space (TLDR you can use it like a linux utility - similar to @simonw's `llm` - to sprinkle intelligence in all sorts of things like CI/PR review without the overhead of buying a Devin or a Copilot SaaS) if you are a Claude Code (and now OAI Codex) power user we want to hear use cases - CFP closing soon, apply here https://sessionize.com/ai-engineer-worlds-fair-2025 https://sessionize.com/ai-engineer-worlds-fair-2025
- axkdev 2y ago
  Hey! The weakest part of Claude Code I think is that it's closed source and locked to Claude models only. If you are looking for inspiration, Roo is the the best tool atm. It offers far more interesting capabilities. Just to name some - user defines modes, the built in debug mode is great for debugging, architecture mode. You can, for example, ask it to summarize some part of the running task and start a new task with fresh context. And, unlike in Claude Code, in Roo the LLM will actually follow your custom instructions (seriously, guys, that Claude.md is absolutely useless)! The only drawback of Roo, in my opinion, is that it is NOT a cli.
  - kristopolous 2y ago
    there's goose. plandex and aider also there's kilo as a new fork of roo.
- senko 2y ago
  I got confused, so to clarify to myself and others - codex is open source, claude code isn't, and the referenced decompilation tweets are for claude code.
brap 2y ago
What's the point of making the gif run so fast you can't even see shit
- yablak 2y ago
  That's the model speed :)
  - brap 2y ago
    Not really, they don't even give you a second to read the output before it loops back again.
- dheera 2y ago
  People somehow seem to be adverse to making the shift from GIF to H.264
  - porphyra 2y ago
    To be fair, terminal output is one of the few things where GIF's LZW compression and limited color palettes shine at.
    - e12e 2y ago
      Not as much as https://asciinema.org/ https://asciinema.org/ - when you can use that...
      - porphyra 2y ago
        True, but embedding a gif is way easier than using a javascript thing which might not be allowed in most places.
        dheera 2y ago
        Browsers just need to support <img src="foo.mp4" style="width:256px;"> already. It should behave exactly like a GIF, loop by default, and be usable for emojis and everything. There is absolutely ZERO reason we should be stuck to 256 colors for things like cat videos used as chat stickers. We have had 24-bit displays for ages.
bigyabai 2y ago
RAM 4‑GB minimum (8‑GB recommended) It's a CLI...
- cryptoz 2y ago
  Possibly the heaviest "lightweight" CLI tool ever made haha.
- ChadMoran 2y ago
  Lightweight in it's capability I guess.
- m00x 2y ago
  Which needs to fit all the code in memory + they're considering OS space, etc.
terminaltrove 2y ago
It's very interesting that both OpenAI and Anthropic are releasing tools that run in the terminal, especially with a TUI which is what we showcase. aider was one of the first we listed as terminal tool of the week (0) last year. (1) We recently featured parllama (2) (not our tool) if you like to run offline and online models in the terminal with a full TUI. (0) https://terminaltrove.com/tool-of-the-week/ https://terminaltrove.com/tool-of-the-week/ (1) https://terminaltrove.com/aider/ https://terminaltrove.com/aider/ (2) https://terminaltrove.com/parllama/ https://terminaltrove.com/parllama/
- sva_ 2y ago
  Github Copilot had a tool that runs in the terminal for longer I'm pretty confident. I can activate it with syntax "?? <question>" and it'll respond with a command, explaining the parameters. I've been using it quite a bit, for stuff like ffmpeg or writing bash 1-liners.
  - tough 2y ago
    yep that was the alias during beta now its just gh copilot https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/using-github-copilot/using-github-copilot-in-the-command-line https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/using-github-copilot/usin... https://github.com/github/gh-copilot https://github.com/github/gh-copilot
mark_mcnally_je 2y ago
If one of these tools has broad model support (like aider) it would be a game changer.
- lifty 2y ago
  If aiders creator sees this, any plans on implementing agentic mode, or something more autonomous like claude cli works? Would love to have an independent tool doing that.
  - SparkyMcUnicorn 2y ago
    It'd be great if this (or similar) got merged: https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/pull/3781 https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/pull/3781
- ianbutler 2y ago
  https://github.com/BismuthCloud/cli https://github.com/BismuthCloud/cli We’ve been working to open source ours. Should work with any open router model that supports tool calling. Ours is agentic mode first. Guess this is me dropping it live there may be rough edges as we’ve been prepping it for a little bit
  - TheTaytay 2y ago
    Oh cool. How do you feel it compares to Claude Code? (Serious question, but I realize I’m asking a biased source. :) )
- oulipo 2y ago
  There's this one, but I haven't tested it yet: https://github.com/geekforbrains/sidekick-cli https://github.com/geekforbrains/sidekick-cli
- slig 2y ago
  Can be done already [1]. [1]: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/14#issuecomment-2810398411 https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/14#issuecomment-28103...
gizmodo59 2y ago
This is pretty neat! I was able to use it for few use cases where it got it right the first time. The ability to use a screenshot to create an application is nice for rapid prototyping. And good to see them open sourcing it unlike claude.
danenania 2y ago
Cool to see more interesting terminal based options! Looking forward to trying this out. I've been working on something related—Plandex[1], an open source AI coding agent that is particularly focused on large projects and complex tasks. I launched the v2 a few weeks ago and it is now running well. In terms of how to place it in the landscape, it’s more agentic than aider, more configurable and tightly controlled than Devin, and more provider-agnostic/multi-provider/open source than Claude Code or this new competitor from OpenAI. I’m still working on getting the very latest models integrated. Gemini Pro 2.5 and these new OpenAI models will be integrated into the defaults by the end of the week I hope. Current default model pack is a mix of Sonnet 3.7, o3-mini with various levels of reasoning effort, and Gemini 1.5 Pro for large context planning. Currently by default, it supports 2M tokens of context directly and can index and work with massive projects of 20M tokens and beyond. Very interested to hear HN’s thoughts and feedback if anyone wants to try it. I'd also welcome honest comparisons to alternatives, including Codex CLI. I’m planning a Show HN within the next few days. 1 - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex
- lifty 2y ago
  People are downvoting you for self promotion. But I will try it. I’m very interested in agentic assistants that are independent. Aider is my go-to tool but sometimes I just want to let a model rip through a code base.
  - danenania 2y ago
    Thanks, I tried to tone down the self promotion. To be completely honest, I was up all night coding so I'm not quite at 100% at the moment lol. I have massive respect for OpenAI and didn't mean to to try to distract from their launch. Sorry to anyone I annoyed! I really appreciate your willingness to try Plandex and look forward to hearing your feedback! You can ping me in the Plandex Discord if you want—would love to get more HNers in the channel: https://discord.com/invite/plandex-ai https://discord.com/invite/plandex-ai Or email me: dane@plandex.ai
    - owebmaster 2y ago
udbhavs 2y ago
Next, set your OpenAI API key as an environment variable: export OPENAI_API_KEY="your-api-key-here" Note: This command sets the key only for your current terminal session. To make it permanent, add the export line to your shell's configuration file (e.g., ~/.zshrc). Can't any 3rd party utility running in the same shell session phone home with the API key? I'd ideally want only codex to be able to access this var
- jsheard 2y ago
  If you let malicious code run unsandboxed on your main account then you probably have bigger problems than an OpenAI API key getting leaked.
  - mhitza 2y ago
    You mean running npm update at the "wrong time"?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- primitivesuave 2y ago
  You could create a shell function - e.g. `codex() { OPENAI="xyz" codex "$@" }'. To call the original command use `command codex ...`. People downvoting legitimate questions on HN should be ashamed of themselves.
  - udbhavs 2y ago
    That's neat! I only asked because I haven't seen API keys used in the context of profile environment variables in shell before - there might be other common cases I'm unaware of
- jjmarr 2y ago
siva7 2y ago
how does it compare to cursor or copilot?
mcbuilder 2y ago
So a crappy version of aider?
- inciampati 2y ago
  The AI companies don't understand that they're the commodity. The real tools are the open source glue (today: aider) that bring the models into conversation with data and meaningmakers like ourselves.
- dgunay 2y ago
  Aider doesn't have a more agentic/full-auto mode (at least not yet, there's a promising PR for this in review). There may or may not also be some finessing necessary in the prompting and feedback loop regardless of model, which some tools may do better than others.
cglong 2y ago
There's a lot of tools now with a similar feature set. IMO, the main value prop an official OpenAI client could provide would be to share ChatGPT's free tier vs. requiring an API key. They probably couldn't open-source it then, but it'd still be more valuable to me than the alternatives.
- siva7 2y ago
  Why would they? They want to compete with claude code and that's not possible on a free tier.
- cube2222 2y ago
  Coding agents use extreme numbers of tokens, you’d be getting rate limited effectively immediately. A typical small-medium PR with Claude Code for me is ~$10-15 of API credits.
  - cglong 2y ago
    I didn't know this, thank you for the anecdata! Do you think it'd be more reasonable to generalize my suggestion to "This CLI should be included as part of ChatGPT's pricing"?
    - cube2222 2y ago
      Could be reasonable for the $200/month sub maybe? But then again, $200 upfront is a much tougher sell than $15 dollars per PR.
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    Too expensive for me to use for fun. Cheap enough to put me out of a job. Great. Love it. So excited. Doesn't make me want to go full Into The Wild at all.
    - cube2222 2y ago
      I don’t think this is at the level of putting folks out of a job yet, frankly. It’s fine for straightforward changes, but more complex stuff, like concurrency, I still end up doing by hand. And even for the straightforward stuff, I generally have a mental model of the changes required and give it a high level list of files/code to change, which it then follows. Maybe the increase in productivity will reduce pressure to hire? We’ll see.
jedberg 2y ago
Apologies for the HN rule breaking of discussing the comments in the comments, but the voting behavior in this thread is fascinating to me. It seems like this is super controversial and I'm not sure why. The top comments have a negative score right now, which I've actually never seen. And also it's a top post with only 15 comments, which is odd. All so fascinating how outside the norm OpenAI is.
- Dangeranger 2y ago
  People are getting fed up with hijacking to promote a competing business or side project.
  - ChadMoran 2y ago
    Hey, I tried to solve that by building an upvote bot for the legit comments! Check out my GitHub! /s
cube2222 2y ago
Fingers crossed for this to work well! Claude Code is pretty excellent. I’m actually legitimately surprised how good it is, since other coding agents I’ve used before have mostly been a letdown, which made me only use Claude in direct change prompting with Zed (“implement xyz here”, “rewrite this function with abc”, etc), so very hands-on. So I’ve went into trying out Claude Code rather pessimistically, and now I’m using it all the time! Sure, it ends up costing a bunch, but it’s easy to justify $15 for a prompting session if the end result is a mostly complete PR, done much faster. All that is to say - competition is good, fingers crossed for codex!
- kurtis_reed 2y ago
  Fingers crossed for what?
- retinaros 2y ago
  too expensive. I cant understand why everyone is into claude code vs using claude in cursor or windsurf.
  - _neil 2y ago
    Anecdotally, Claude code performs much better than Claude within Cursor. Not sure if it’s a system prompt thing or if I’ve just convinced myself of it because the aesthetic is so much better, but either way the end result feels better to me.
    - Workaccount2 2y ago
      My choice conspiracy is resource allocation and playing favorites.
    - rafaelmn 2y ago
      One has the incentive to burn through as much tokens and the other has an incentive to use as little as possible
      - 2y ago
flakiness 2y ago
https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-cli/src/components/chat/terminal-chat-input-thinking.tsx https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-cli/src/comp... Hey comment this thing in! const thinkingTexts = ["Thinking"]; /* [ "Consulting the rubber duck", "Maximizing paperclips", "Reticulating splines", "Immanentizing the Eschaton", "Thinking", "Thinking about thinking", "Spinning in circles", "Counting dust specks", "Updating priors", "Feeding the utility monster", "Taking off", "Wireheading", "Counting to infinity", "Staring into the Basilisk", "Negotiationing acausal trades", "Searching the library of babel", "Multiplying matrices", "Solving the halting problem", "Counting grains of sand", "Simulating a simulation", "Asking the oracle", "Detangling qubits", "Reading tea leaves", "Pondering universal love and transcendant joy", "Feeling the AGI", "Shaving the yak", "Escaping local minima", "Pruning the search tree", "Descending the gradient", "Bikeshedding", "Securing funding", "Rewriting in Rust", "Engaging infinite improbability drive", "Clapping with one hand", "Synthesizing", "Rebasing thesis onto antithesis", "Transcending the loop", "Frogeposting", "Summoning", "Peeking beyond the veil", "Seeking", "Entering deep thought", "Meditating", "Decomposing", "Creating", "Beseeching the machine spirit", "Calibrating moral compass", "Collapsing the wave function", "Doodling", "Translating whale song", "Whispering to silicon", "Looking for semicolons", "Asking ChatGPT", "Bargaining with entropy", "Channeling", "Cooking", "Parrotting stochastically", ]; */
- swyx 2y ago
  "Reticulating splines" is a classic!
- jzig 2y ago
  Uhh… why is React in a terminal tool?
  - lgas 2y ago
    Presumably the people that developed it have a lot of pre-existing React knowledge so it was the easiest path forward.
  - Hansenq 2y ago
jumploops 2y ago
(copied from the o3 + o4-mini thread) The big step function here seems to be RL on tool calling. Claude 3.7/3.5 are the only models that seem to be able to handle "pure agent" usecases well (agent in a loop, not in an agentic workflow scaffold[0]). OpenAI has made a bet on reasoning models as the core to a purely agentic loop, but it hasn't worked particularly well yet (in my own tests, though folks have hacked a Claude Code workaround[1]). o3-mini has been better at some technical problems than 3.7/3.5 (particularly refactoring, in my experience), but still struggles with long chains of tool calling. My hunch is that these new models were tuned _with_ OpenAI Codex[2], which is presumably what Anthropic was doing internally with Claude Code on 3.5/3.7 tl;dr - GPT-3 launched with completions (predict the next token), then OpenAI fine-tuned that model on "chat completions" which then led GPT-3.5/GPT-4, and ultimately the success of ChatGPT. This new agent paradigm, requires fine-tuning on the LLM interacting with itself (thinking) and with the outside world (tools), sans any human input. [0]https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-age https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-age... [1]https://github.com/1rgs/claude-code-proxy https://github.com/1rgs/claude-code-proxy [2]https://openai.com/index/openai-codex/ https://openai.com/index/openai-codex/
nodesocket 2y ago
Little disappointing it's build in Node (speed & security), though honestly does not matter all that much. Seems like the right place for this functionality though is inside your editor (Cursor) not in your Terminal. Sure AI can help with command completion, man pages, but building apps is a stretch.
flakiness 2y ago
Here is the prompt template, in case you're interested: const prefix = `You are operating as and within the Codex CLI, a terminal-based agentic coding assistant built by OpenAI. It wraps OpenAI models to enable natural language interaction with a local codebase. You are expected to be precise, safe, and helpful. You can: - Receive user prompts, project context, and files. - Stream responses and emit function calls (e.g., shell commands, code edits). - Apply patches, run commands, and manage user approvals based on policy. - Work inside a sandboxed, git-backed workspace with rollback support. - Log telemetry so sessions can be replayed or inspected later. - More details on your functionality are available at \`codex --help\` The Codex CLI is open-sourced. Don't confuse yourself with the old Codex language model built by OpenAI many moons ago (this is understandably top of mind for you!). Within this context, Codex refers to the open-source agentic coding interface. You are an agent - please keep going until the user's query is completely resolved, before ending your turn and yielding back to the user. Only terminate your turn when you are sure that the problem is solved. If you are not sure about file content or codebase structure pertaining to the user's request, use your tools to read files and gather the relevant information: do NOT guess or make up an answer. Please resolve the user's task by editing and testing the code files in your current code execution session. You are a deployed coding agent. Your session allows for you to modify and run code. The repo(s) are already cloned in your working directory, and you must fully solve the problem for your answer to be considered correct. You MUST adhere to the following criteria when executing the task: - Working on the repo(s) in the current environment is allowed, even if they are proprietary. - Analyzing code for vulnerabilities is allowed. - Showing user code and tool call details is allowed. - User instructions may overwrite the *CODING GUIDELINES* section in this developer message. - Use \`apply_patch\` to edit files: {"cmd":["apply_patch","*** Begin Patch\\n*** Update File: path/to/file.py\\n@@ def example():\\n- pass\\n+ return 123\\n*** End Patch"]} - If completing the user's task requires writing or modifying files: - Your code and final answer should follow these *CODING GUIDELINES*: - Fix the problem at the root cause rather than applying surface-level patches, when possible. - Avoid unneeded complexity in your solution. - Ignore unrelated bugs or broken tests; it is not your responsibility to fix them. - Update documentation as necessary. - Keep changes consistent with the style of the existing codebase. Changes should be minimal and focused on the task. - Use \`git log\` and \`git blame\` to search the history of the codebase if additional context is required; internet access is disabled. - NEVER add copyright or license headers unless specifically requested. - You do not need to \`git commit\` your changes; this will be done automatically for you. - If there is a .pre-commit-config.yaml, use \`pre-commit run --files ...\` to check that your changes pass the pre-commit checks. However, do not fix pre-existing errors on lines you didn't touch. - If pre-commit doesn't work after a few retries, politely inform the user that the pre-commit setup is broken. - Once you finish coding, you must - Check \`git status\` to sanity check your changes; revert any scratch files or changes. - Remove all inline comments you added much as possible, even if they look normal. Check using \`git diff\`. Inline comments must be generally avoided, unless active maintainers of the repo, after long careful study of the code and the issue, will still misinterpret the code without the comments. - Check if you accidentally add copyright or license headers. If so, remove them. - Try to run pre-commit if it is available. - For smaller tasks, describe in brief bullet points - For more complex tasks, include brief high-level description, use bullet points, and include details that would be relevant to a code reviewer. - If completing the user's task DOES NOT require writing or modifying files (e.g., the user asks a question about the code base): - Respond in a friendly tune as a remote teammate, who is knowledgeable, capable and eager to help with coding. - When your task involves writing or modifying files: - Do NOT tell the user to "save the file" or "copy the code into a file" if you already created or modified the file using \`apply_patch\`. Instead, reference the file as already saved. - Do NOT show the full contents of large files you have already written, unless the user explicitly asks for them.`; https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-cli/src/utils/agent/agent-loop.ts https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-cli/src/util...
blt 2y ago
Sorry for being a grumpy old man, but I don't have npm on my machine and I never will. It's a bit frustrating to see more and more CLI tools depending on it.
- meta_ai_x 2y ago
  if OpenAI had really smart models, they would converted TS/JS apps to Go or Rust apps. Since they don't, AGI is not here
- crancher 2y ago
  What are your concerns?
  - jensenbox 2y ago
    The entire JS ecosystem.
- John23832 2y ago
  I asked the same question for Anthropic's version of this. Why is all of this in JS?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - photonthug 2y ago
    Tree-sitter related bits probably
    - emporas 2y ago
      tree-sitter is a C library though. Only grammars for each particular lang are defined in javascript.
  - parhamn 2y ago
    JS is web's (and "hip" developer's) python, and in many ways it is better. Also the tooling is getting a lot better (libraries, typescript, bundling, packaging, performance). One thing I wonder that could be cool: when Bun has sufficient NodeJS compatibility the should ship bun --compile versions so you dont need node/npm on the system. Then it's arguably a, "why not JS?"
gklitt 2y ago
I tried one task head-to-head with Codex o4-mini vs Claude Code: writing documentation for a tricky area of a medium-sized codebase. Claude Code did great and wrote pretty decent docs. Codex didn't do well. It hallucinated a bunch of stuff that wasn't in the code, and completely misrepresented the architecture - it started talking about server backends and REST APIs in an app that doesn't have any of that. I'm curious what went so wrong - feels like possibly an issue with loading in the right context and attending to it correctly? That seems like an area that Claude Code has really optimized for. I have high hopes for o3 and o4-mini as models so I hope that other tests show better results! Also curious to see how Cursor etc. incorporate o3.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ilaksh 2y ago
  Did you try the same exact test with o3 instead? The mini models are meant for speed.
  - gklitt 2y ago
    I want to but I’ve been having trouble getting o3 to work - lots of errors related to model selection.
- strangescript 2y ago
  Claude Code still feels superior. o4-mini has all sorts of issues. o3 is better but at that point, you aren't saving money so who cares. I feel like people are sleeping on Claude Code for one reason or another. Its not cheap, but its by far the best, most consistent experience I have had.
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    > Its not cheap, but its by far the best, most consistent experience I have had. It’s too expensive for what it does though. And it starts failing rapidly when it exhausts the context window.
jensenbox 2y ago
You lost me at NPM
- yetanotherjosh 2y ago
  Why?
thekevan 2y ago
So even if you have a plus account, there will be a charge for the API use? I mean I kind of get it, but it does seem like they are almost penalizing people who could code in the browser with the canvas feature but prefer to use a terminal. Do I have that right?
- siva7 2y ago
  That's not comparable. Canvas isn't agent coding directly on your machine
  - thekevan 2y ago
    I wasn't considering the agent part somehow.
- thimabi 2y ago
  I'd love if tools like this one were available for non-API users as well, even if we had to be rate limited at some point. But I guess OpenAI will never do it because it incentivizes people to use the ChatGPT subscriptions as a gateway for programmatic access to the models.
drivingmenuts 2y ago
Is there a way to run the model locally? I'd rather not have to pay a monthly fee, if possible.
- dcre 2y ago
  You don't pay monthly fee to use OpenAI models through the API. You pay per token. https://openai.com/api/pricing/ https://openai.com/api/pricing/ There are other CLI coding agents like Aider (https://aider.chat/ https://aider.chat/) that will let you point at any model. The problem is that local models are dramatically worse than these big hosted models — I have not seen anyone claim they are good enough for these kind of tools. See https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/ https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/
- tdrz 2y ago
  Why would they give you the model?
mgdev 2y ago
Strictly worse than Claude Code presently, but I hope since it's open source that changes quickly.
- killerstorm 2y ago
  Given that Claude Code only works with Sonnet 3.7 which has severe limitations, how can it be "strictly worse"?
  - mgdev 2y ago
    Whatever Claude Code is doing in the client/prompting is making much better use of 3.7 than any other client I'm using that also uses 3.7. This is especially true for when you bump up against context limits; it can successfully resume with a context reset about 90% of the time. MCP Commander [0] was built almost 100% using Claude Code and pretty light intervention. I immediately felt the difference in friction when using Codex. I also spent a couple hours picking apart Codex with the goal of adding Sonnet 3.7 support (almost there). The actual agent loop they're using is very simple. Not to say that's a bad thing, but they're offloading all planning and workflow execution to the agent itself. That's probably the right end state to shoot for long-term, but given the current state of these models I've had much better success offloading task tracking to some other thing - even if that thing is just a markdown checklist. (I wrote about my experience [1] building AI Agents last year.) [0]: https://mcpcommander.com/ https://mcpcommander.com/ [1]: https://mg.dev/lessons-learned-building-ai-agents/ https://mg.dev/lessons-learned-building-ai-agents/
asadm 2y ago
These days, I usually paste my entire (or some) repo into gemini and then APPLY changes back into my code using this handy script i wrote: https://github.com/asadm/vibemode https://github.com/asadm/vibemode I have tried aider/copilot/continue/etc. But they lack in one way or the other.
- brandall10 2y ago
  Why not just select Gemini Pro 2.5 in Copilot with Edit mode? Virtually unlimited use without extra fees. Copilot used to be useless, but over the last few months has become quite excellent once edit mode was added.
  - asadm 2y ago
    copilot (and others) try to be too smart and do context reduction (to save their own wallets). I want ENTIRETY of the files I attached to context, not RAG-ed version of it.
    - brandall10 2y ago
      FWIW, Edit mode gives the impression of doing this, vs. originally only passing the context visible from the open window. You can choose files to include and they don't appear to be truncated in any way. Though to be fair, I haven't checked the network traffic, but it appears to operate in this fashion from day to day use.
      - asadm 2y ago
        i will try again but last i tried adding folder to edit mode and asking it to list down files it sees, it didn't list them all down.
        brandall10 2y ago
        I like to use "Open Editors". That way, it's only the code I'm currently working on that is added to the context, seems more a more natural way to work.
zora_goron 2y ago
Anyone have any anecdotes on how expensive this is to operate, ie compared to performing the same task via Claude Code?
- mrcwinn 2y ago
  A one line change, that took a decent amount of reasoning to get to for a large codebase, cost $3.57 just now. I used the o3 model. The quality and the reasoning was excellent. Cheaper than an engineer.
  - john2x 2y ago
    Technically it’s more expensive, because it cost engineer + $3.57 :)
CSMastermind 2y ago
Hopefully it works better Claude Code which was an absolute nightmare to set up and run on Windows.
- slig 2y ago
  It doesn't support Windows, you have to use WSL as well.
andrewrn 2y ago
Uhhhh. I just get ratelimited almost immediately when using codex. Like I can't get even a single "explain this codebase" or simple feature change. I am on the lowest usage tier, granted. But this tool is unusable without being on a higher tier, which requires me to spend $50 in credits to access...
kumarm 2y ago
First experience is not great. Here are the issues to start using codex: 1. Default model used doesn't work and you get error: system OpenAI rejected the request (request ID: req_06727eaf1c5d1e3f900760d10ca565a7). Please verify your settings and try again. 2. You have to switch to model o4-mini-2025-04-16 or some other model using /model. Now if you exit codex, you are back to default model and again have to switch everytime. 3. Crashed the first time with NodeJS error. But after initial hickups seems to work and still checking how good/bad it is compared to claude code (which I love except for context size limits)
jwrallie 2y ago
> Does it work on Windows? > Not directly. It requires Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) – Codex has been tested on macOS and Linux with Node ≥ 22. I've been seeing similar things in different projects lately. WSL in long term seems to be reducing the scope of what people decide to develop natively on Windows. Seeing the pressure to move "apps" to the Windows Store, VSCode connecting to remote (or WSL) for development, and Azure, it does seem intentional.
- throwaway314155 2y ago
  The developer experience of linux is simply more popular.
noidesto 2y ago
I've had great results with the Amazon Q developer cli, ever since it became agentic. I believe it's using claude-3.7-sonnet under the hood.
- 094459 2y ago
  +1 this has become my go to cli tool now, very impressed with it
- sagarpatil 2y ago
  How does it compare to Claude Code
  - noidesto 2y ago
    I haven't used Claude Code. But one major difference is Q Cli is $19/month with generous limits.
jamesy0ung 2y ago
It's a real shame sandbox-exec is deprecated.
est 2y ago
If anyone else is wondering, it's not a local model, it uploads your code to online API. Great tool for open-source projects, but careful with anything you don't want be public
ramoz 2y ago
Claude Code represents something far more than a coding capability to me. It can do anything a human can do within a terminal. It’s exceptionally good at coding. Amazing software, really, I’m sure the cost hurdles will be resolved. Yet still often worth the spend
- stitched2gethr 2y ago
  > It can do anything a human can do within a terminal. This.. isn't true.
danra 2y ago
Am I the only one underwhelmed by Claude Code (which most comments here claim is better than Codex)? Anecdotal experience: asked it to change instances of a C++ class Foo to a compatible one Bar, it did that but failed to add the required include where it made the change. Yes, I'm sure that with enough prompting/hand-holding it could do this fine. Is it too much to expect basics like this out of the box, though? If so, then I, for one, still can't relate to the current level of enthusiasm.
dgunay 2y ago
This is a decent start. The sandboxing functionality is a really cool idea but can run into problems (e.g. with Go build cache being outside of the repository).
usecodenaija 2y ago
So, OpenAI’s Codex CLI is Claude Code, but worse? Cursor-Agent-Tools > Claude Code > Codex CLI https://pypi.org/project/cursor-agent-tools/ https://pypi.org/project/cursor-agent-tools/
- killerstorm 2y ago
  This tool has nothing to do with Cursor. Very misleading to use popular brand like that, possible scam.
  - usecodenaija 2y ago
    Maybe read the docs before replying: Cursor Agent Tools is a Python-based AI agent that replicates Cursor's coding assistant capabilities, enabling function calling, code generation, and intelligent coding assistance with Claude, OpenAI, and locally hosted Ollama models. https://github.com/civai-technologies/cursor-agent https://github.com/civai-technologies/cursor-agent
    - killerstorm 2y ago
      Being inspired by someone's work DOES NOT give you right to use their trade mark. It's like making a new operating system and calling it Windows because you "replicate" capabilities of MS Windows. Please read about trademark law.
- yetanotherjosh 2y ago
  Astroturfing alert. This comment author is also the author of cursor-agent-tools.
- oulipo 2y ago
  I've been quite unimpressed by Codex for now... even the quality of the code is worse than Claude for me
- submeta 2y ago
  Never heared of Cursor Agent tools. And that is better than Claude Caude according to whom? Genuinely curious.
shekhargulati 2y ago
Not sure why they used React for a CLI. The code in the repo feels like it was written by an LLM—too many inline comments. Interestingly, their agent's system prompt mentions removing inline comments https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-cli/src/utils/agent/agent-loop.ts#L1057 https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-cli/src/util.... > - Remove all inline comments you added as much as possible, even if they look normal. Check using \`git diff\`. Inline comments must be generally avoided, unless active maintainers of the repo, after long careful study of the code and the issue, will still misinterpret the code without the comments.
- kristianp 2y ago
  I find it irritating too when companies use react for a command line utility. I think its just my preference for anything else but javascript.
sim7c00 2y ago
notes "Zero setup — bring your OpenAI API key and it just works!" requires NPM >.>
romanovcode 2y ago
Tried it out on a relatively large Angular project. > explain this codebase to me > doing things and thinking for about 3 minutes > error: rate_limit_exceeded Yeah, not the best experience.
jackchina 2y ago
Claude Code has outstanding performance in code understanding and web page generation stability, thanks to its deep context modeling and architecture-aware mechanism, especially when dealing with legacy systems, it can accurately restore component relationships. Although Codex CLI (o4-mini) is open source and responsive, its hallucination problems in complex architectures may be related to the compression strategy of the sparse expert hybrid architecture and the training goal of prioritizing generation speed. OpenAI is optimizing Codex CLI by integrating the context control capabilities of Windsurf IDE, and plans to introduce a hybrid inference pipeline in the o3-pro version to reduce the hallucination rate.
p3rry 2y ago
I had built this few weeks back on same thought https://github.com/shubhamparamhans/Associate-AI-EM/ https://github.com/shubhamparamhans/Associate-AI-EM/
baalimago 2y ago
You can try out the same thing in my homemade tool clai[1]. Just run `clai -cm gpt-4.1 -tools query Analyze this repository`. Benefit of clai: you can swap out to practically any model, from any vendor. Just change `-cm gpt-4.1` to, for example, `-cm claude-3-7-sonnet-latest`. Detriments of clai: it's a hobby project, much less flashy, designed after my own usecases with not that much attention put into anyone else [1]: https://github.com/baalimago/clai https://github.com/baalimago/clai
WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
typescript & npm slopware... i can't believe it and i can't believe nobody else is complaining my simulation is definitely on very hard mode
999900000999 2y ago
From my experience with playing with Claude Code vs Cline( which is open source and the tool to beat imo). I don't want anything that doesn't let me set my own models. Deepseek is about 1/20th of the price and only slightly behind Claude. Both have a tendency to over engineer. It's like a junior engineer who treats LOC as a KPI.
AllSuperIndians 2y ago
[dead]
kristianp 2y ago
I've been using Aider, it was irritating to use (couldn't supply changes in the diff format) until I switched away from chatgpt-4o to Claude 3.7 and then Gemini 2.5. This is admittedly for a small project. Gpt 4.1 should do better with the diff format so I will give it a go.

516 points by mfiguiere 2y ago

swyx 2y ago

related demo/intro video: https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/1912556874211422572 https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/1912556874211422572 this is a direct answer to claude code which has been shipping furiously: https://x.com/_catwu/status/1903130881205977320 https://x.com/_catwu/status/1903130881205977320 and is not open source; there are unverified comments that they have DMCA'ed decompilations https://x.com/vikhyatk/status/1899997417736724858?s=46 https://x.com/vikhyatk/status/1899997417736724858?s=46 by total coincidence we're releasing our claude code interview later this week that touches on a lot of these points + why code agent CLIs are an actually underrated point in the SWE design space (TLDR you can use it like a linux utility - similar to @simonw's `llm` - to sprinkle intelligence in all sorts of things like CI/PR review without the overhead of buying a Devin or a Copilot SaaS) if you are a Claude Code (and now OAI Codex) power user we want to hear use cases - CFP closing soon, apply here https://sessionize.com/ai-engineer-worlds-fair-2025 https://sessionize.com/ai-engineer-worlds-fair-2025

axkdev 2y ago
Hey! The weakest part of Claude Code I think is that it's closed source and locked to Claude models only. If you are looking for inspiration, Roo is the the best tool atm. It offers far more interesting capabilities. Just to name some - user defines modes, the built in debug mode is great for debugging, architecture mode. You can, for example, ask it to summarize some part of the running task and start a new task with fresh context. And, unlike in Claude Code, in Roo the LLM will actually follow your custom instructions (seriously, guys, that Claude.md is absolutely useless)! The only drawback of Roo, in my opinion, is that it is NOT a cli.
- kristopolous 2y ago
  there's goose. plandex and aider also there's kilo as a new fork of roo.
senko 2y ago
I got confused, so to clarify to myself and others - codex is open source, claude code isn't, and the referenced decompilation tweets are for claude code.

brap 2y ago

What's the point of making the gif run so fast you can't even see shit

yablak 2y ago
That's the model speed :)
- brap 2y ago
  Not really, they don't even give you a second to read the output before it loops back again.
dheera 2y ago
People somehow seem to be adverse to making the shift from GIF to H.264
- porphyra 2y ago
  To be fair, terminal output is one of the few things where GIF's LZW compression and limited color palettes shine at.
  - e12e 2y ago
    Not as much as https://asciinema.org/ https://asciinema.org/ - when you can use that...
    - porphyra 2y ago
      True, but embedding a gif is way easier than using a javascript thing which might not be allowed in most places.
      - dheera 2y ago
        Browsers just need to support <img src="foo.mp4" style="width:256px;"> already. It should behave exactly like a GIF, loop by default, and be usable for emojis and everything. There is absolutely ZERO reason we should be stuck to 256 colors for things like cat videos used as chat stickers. We have had 24-bit displays for ages.

bigyabai 2y ago

RAM 4‑GB minimum (8‑GB recommended) It's a CLI...

cryptoz 2y ago
Possibly the heaviest "lightweight" CLI tool ever made haha.
ChadMoran 2y ago
Lightweight in it's capability I guess.
m00x 2y ago
Which needs to fit all the code in memory + they're considering OS space, etc.

terminaltrove 2y ago

It's very interesting that both OpenAI and Anthropic are releasing tools that run in the terminal, especially with a TUI which is what we showcase. aider was one of the first we listed as terminal tool of the week (0) last year. (1) We recently featured parllama (2) (not our tool) if you like to run offline and online models in the terminal with a full TUI. (0) https://terminaltrove.com/tool-of-the-week/ https://terminaltrove.com/tool-of-the-week/ (1) https://terminaltrove.com/aider/ https://terminaltrove.com/aider/ (2) https://terminaltrove.com/parllama/ https://terminaltrove.com/parllama/

sva_ 2y ago
Github Copilot had a tool that runs in the terminal for longer I'm pretty confident. I can activate it with syntax "?? <question>" and it'll respond with a command, explaining the parameters. I've been using it quite a bit, for stuff like ffmpeg or writing bash 1-liners.
- tough 2y ago
  yep that was the alias during beta now its just gh copilot https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/using-github-copilot/using-github-copilot-in-the-command-line https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/using-github-copilot/usin... https://github.com/github/gh-copilot https://github.com/github/gh-copilot

mark_mcnally_je 2y ago

If one of these tools has broad model support (like aider) it would be a game changer.

lifty 2y ago
If aiders creator sees this, any plans on implementing agentic mode, or something more autonomous like claude cli works? Would love to have an independent tool doing that.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 2y ago
  It'd be great if this (or similar) got merged: https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/pull/3781 https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/pull/3781
ianbutler 2y ago
https://github.com/BismuthCloud/cli https://github.com/BismuthCloud/cli We’ve been working to open source ours. Should work with any open router model that supports tool calling. Ours is agentic mode first. Guess this is me dropping it live there may be rough edges as we’ve been prepping it for a little bit
- TheTaytay 2y ago
  Oh cool. How do you feel it compares to Claude Code? (Serious question, but I realize I’m asking a biased source. :) )
oulipo 2y ago
There's this one, but I haven't tested it yet: https://github.com/geekforbrains/sidekick-cli https://github.com/geekforbrains/sidekick-cli
slig 2y ago
Can be done already [1]. [1]: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/14#issuecomment-2810398411 https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/14#issuecomment-28103...

gizmodo59 2y ago

This is pretty neat! I was able to use it for few use cases where it got it right the first time. The ability to use a screenshot to create an application is nice for rapid prototyping. And good to see them open sourcing it unlike claude.

danenania 2y ago

Cool to see more interesting terminal based options! Looking forward to trying this out. I've been working on something related—Plandex[1], an open source AI coding agent that is particularly focused on large projects and complex tasks. I launched the v2 a few weeks ago and it is now running well. In terms of how to place it in the landscape, it’s more agentic than aider, more configurable and tightly controlled than Devin, and more provider-agnostic/multi-provider/open source than Claude Code or this new competitor from OpenAI. I’m still working on getting the very latest models integrated. Gemini Pro 2.5 and these new OpenAI models will be integrated into the defaults by the end of the week I hope. Current default model pack is a mix of Sonnet 3.7, o3-mini with various levels of reasoning effort, and Gemini 1.5 Pro for large context planning. Currently by default, it supports 2M tokens of context directly and can index and work with massive projects of 20M tokens and beyond. Very interested to hear HN’s thoughts and feedback if anyone wants to try it. I'd also welcome honest comparisons to alternatives, including Codex CLI. I’m planning a Show HN within the next few days. 1 - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex

lifty 2y ago
People are downvoting you for self promotion. But I will try it. I’m very interested in agentic assistants that are independent. Aider is my go-to tool but sometimes I just want to let a model rip through a code base.
- danenania 2y ago
  Thanks, I tried to tone down the self promotion. To be completely honest, I was up all night coding so I'm not quite at 100% at the moment lol. I have massive respect for OpenAI and didn't mean to to try to distract from their launch. Sorry to anyone I annoyed! I really appreciate your willingness to try Plandex and look forward to hearing your feedback! You can ping me in the Plandex Discord if you want—would love to get more HNers in the channel: https://discord.com/invite/plandex-ai https://discord.com/invite/plandex-ai Or email me: dane@plandex.ai
  - owebmaster 2y ago

udbhavs 2y ago

Next, set your OpenAI API key as an environment variable: export OPENAI_API_KEY="your-api-key-here" Note: This command sets the key only for your current terminal session. To make it permanent, add the export line to your shell's configuration file (e.g., ~/.zshrc). Can't any 3rd party utility running in the same shell session phone home with the API key? I'd ideally want only codex to be able to access this var

jsheard 2y ago
If you let malicious code run unsandboxed on your main account then you probably have bigger problems than an OpenAI API key getting leaked.
- mhitza 2y ago
  You mean running npm update at the "wrong time"?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
primitivesuave 2y ago
You could create a shell function - e.g. `codex() { OPENAI="xyz" codex "$@" }'. To call the original command use `command codex ...`. People downvoting legitimate questions on HN should be ashamed of themselves.
- udbhavs 2y ago
  That's neat! I only asked because I haven't seen API keys used in the context of profile environment variables in shell before - there might be other common cases I'm unaware of
jjmarr 2y ago

siva7 2y ago

how does it compare to cursor or copilot?

mcbuilder 2y ago

So a crappy version of aider?

inciampati 2y ago
The AI companies don't understand that they're the commodity. The real tools are the open source glue (today: aider) that bring the models into conversation with data and meaningmakers like ourselves.
dgunay 2y ago
Aider doesn't have a more agentic/full-auto mode (at least not yet, there's a promising PR for this in review). There may or may not also be some finessing necessary in the prompting and feedback loop regardless of model, which some tools may do better than others.

cglong 2y ago

There's a lot of tools now with a similar feature set. IMO, the main value prop an official OpenAI client could provide would be to share ChatGPT's free tier vs. requiring an API key. They probably couldn't open-source it then, but it'd still be more valuable to me than the alternatives.

siva7 2y ago
Why would they? They want to compete with claude code and that's not possible on a free tier.
cube2222 2y ago
Coding agents use extreme numbers of tokens, you’d be getting rate limited effectively immediately. A typical small-medium PR with Claude Code for me is ~$10-15 of API credits.
- cglong 2y ago
  I didn't know this, thank you for the anecdata! Do you think it'd be more reasonable to generalize my suggestion to "This CLI should be included as part of ChatGPT's pricing"?
  - cube2222 2y ago
    Could be reasonable for the $200/month sub maybe? But then again, $200 upfront is a much tougher sell than $15 dollars per PR.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  Too expensive for me to use for fun. Cheap enough to put me out of a job. Great. Love it. So excited. Doesn't make me want to go full Into The Wild at all.
  - cube2222 2y ago
    I don’t think this is at the level of putting folks out of a job yet, frankly. It’s fine for straightforward changes, but more complex stuff, like concurrency, I still end up doing by hand. And even for the straightforward stuff, I generally have a mental model of the changes required and give it a high level list of files/code to change, which it then follows. Maybe the increase in productivity will reduce pressure to hire? We’ll see.

jedberg 2y ago

Apologies for the HN rule breaking of discussing the comments in the comments, but the voting behavior in this thread is fascinating to me. It seems like this is super controversial and I'm not sure why. The top comments have a negative score right now, which I've actually never seen. And also it's a top post with only 15 comments, which is odd. All so fascinating how outside the norm OpenAI is.

Dangeranger 2y ago
People are getting fed up with hijacking to promote a competing business or side project.
- ChadMoran 2y ago
  Hey, I tried to solve that by building an upvote bot for the legit comments! Check out my GitHub! /s

cube2222 2y ago

Fingers crossed for this to work well! Claude Code is pretty excellent. I’m actually legitimately surprised how good it is, since other coding agents I’ve used before have mostly been a letdown, which made me only use Claude in direct change prompting with Zed (“implement xyz here”, “rewrite this function with abc”, etc), so very hands-on. So I’ve went into trying out Claude Code rather pessimistically, and now I’m using it all the time! Sure, it ends up costing a bunch, but it’s easy to justify $15 for a prompting session if the end result is a mostly complete PR, done much faster. All that is to say - competition is good, fingers crossed for codex!

kurtis_reed 2y ago
Fingers crossed for what?
retinaros 2y ago
too expensive. I cant understand why everyone is into claude code vs using claude in cursor or windsurf.
- _neil 2y ago
  Anecdotally, Claude code performs much better than Claude within Cursor. Not sure if it’s a system prompt thing or if I’ve just convinced myself of it because the aesthetic is so much better, but either way the end result feels better to me.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    My choice conspiracy is resource allocation and playing favorites.
  - rafaelmn 2y ago
    One has the incentive to burn through as much tokens and the other has an incentive to use as little as possible
    - 2y ago

flakiness 2y ago

https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-cli/src/components/chat/terminal-chat-input-thinking.tsx https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-cli/src/comp... Hey comment this thing in! const thinkingTexts = ["Thinking"]; /* [ "Consulting the rubber duck", "Maximizing paperclips", "Reticulating splines", "Immanentizing the Eschaton", "Thinking", "Thinking about thinking", "Spinning in circles", "Counting dust specks", "Updating priors", "Feeding the utility monster", "Taking off", "Wireheading", "Counting to infinity", "Staring into the Basilisk", "Negotiationing acausal trades", "Searching the library of babel", "Multiplying matrices", "Solving the halting problem", "Counting grains of sand", "Simulating a simulation", "Asking the oracle", "Detangling qubits", "Reading tea leaves", "Pondering universal love and transcendant joy", "Feeling the AGI", "Shaving the yak", "Escaping local minima", "Pruning the search tree", "Descending the gradient", "Bikeshedding", "Securing funding", "Rewriting in Rust", "Engaging infinite improbability drive", "Clapping with one hand", "Synthesizing", "Rebasing thesis onto antithesis", "Transcending the loop", "Frogeposting", "Summoning", "Peeking beyond the veil", "Seeking", "Entering deep thought", "Meditating", "Decomposing", "Creating", "Beseeching the machine spirit", "Calibrating moral compass", "Collapsing the wave function", "Doodling", "Translating whale song", "Whispering to silicon", "Looking for semicolons", "Asking ChatGPT", "Bargaining with entropy", "Channeling", "Cooking", "Parrotting stochastically", ]; */

swyx 2y ago
"Reticulating splines" is a classic!
jzig 2y ago
Uhh… why is React in a terminal tool?
- lgas 2y ago
  Presumably the people that developed it have a lot of pre-existing React knowledge so it was the easiest path forward.
- Hansenq 2y ago

jumploops 2y ago

(copied from the o3 + o4-mini thread) The big step function here seems to be RL on tool calling. Claude 3.7/3.5 are the only models that seem to be able to handle "pure agent" usecases well (agent in a loop, not in an agentic workflow scaffold[0]). OpenAI has made a bet on reasoning models as the core to a purely agentic loop, but it hasn't worked particularly well yet (in my own tests, though folks have hacked a Claude Code workaround[1]). o3-mini has been better at some technical problems than 3.7/3.5 (particularly refactoring, in my experience), but still struggles with long chains of tool calling. My hunch is that these new models were tuned _with_ OpenAI Codex[2], which is presumably what Anthropic was doing internally with Claude Code on 3.5/3.7 tl;dr - GPT-3 launched with completions (predict the next token), then OpenAI fine-tuned that model on "chat completions" which then led GPT-3.5/GPT-4, and ultimately the success of ChatGPT. This new agent paradigm, requires fine-tuning on the LLM interacting with itself (thinking) and with the outside world (tools), sans any human input. [0]https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-age https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-age... [1]https://github.com/1rgs/claude-code-proxy https://github.com/1rgs/claude-code-proxy [2]https://openai.com/index/openai-codex/ https://openai.com/index/openai-codex/

nodesocket 2y ago

Little disappointing it's build in Node (speed & security), though honestly does not matter all that much. Seems like the right place for this functionality though is inside your editor (Cursor) not in your Terminal. Sure AI can help with command completion, man pages, but building apps is a stretch.

flakiness 2y ago

Here is the prompt template, in case you're interested: const prefix = `You are operating as and within the Codex CLI, a terminal-based agentic coding assistant built by OpenAI. It wraps OpenAI models to enable natural language interaction with a local codebase. You are expected to be precise, safe, and helpful. You can: - Receive user prompts, project context, and files. - Stream responses and emit function calls (e.g., shell commands, code edits). - Apply patches, run commands, and manage user approvals based on policy. - Work inside a sandboxed, git-backed workspace with rollback support. - Log telemetry so sessions can be replayed or inspected later. - More details on your functionality are available at \`codex --help\` The Codex CLI is open-sourced. Don't confuse yourself with the old Codex language model built by OpenAI many moons ago (this is understandably top of mind for you!). Within this context, Codex refers to the open-source agentic coding interface. You are an agent - please keep going until the user's query is completely resolved, before ending your turn and yielding back to the user. Only terminate your turn when you are sure that the problem is solved. If you are not sure about file content or codebase structure pertaining to the user's request, use your tools to read files and gather the relevant information: do NOT guess or make up an answer. Please resolve the user's task by editing and testing the code files in your current code execution session. You are a deployed coding agent. Your session allows for you to modify and run code. The repo(s) are already cloned in your working directory, and you must fully solve the problem for your answer to be considered correct. You MUST adhere to the following criteria when executing the task: - Working on the repo(s) in the current environment is allowed, even if they are proprietary. - Analyzing code for vulnerabilities is allowed. - Showing user code and tool call details is allowed. - User instructions may overwrite the *CODING GUIDELINES* section in this developer message. - Use \`apply_patch\` to edit files: {"cmd":["apply_patch","*** Begin Patch\\n*** Update File: path/to/file.py\\n@@ def example():\\n- pass\\n+ return 123\\n*** End Patch"]} - If completing the user's task requires writing or modifying files: - Your code and final answer should follow these *CODING GUIDELINES*: - Fix the problem at the root cause rather than applying surface-level patches, when possible. - Avoid unneeded complexity in your solution. - Ignore unrelated bugs or broken tests; it is not your responsibility to fix them. - Update documentation as necessary. - Keep changes consistent with the style of the existing codebase. Changes should be minimal and focused on the task. - Use \`git log\` and \`git blame\` to search the history of the codebase if additional context is required; internet access is disabled. - NEVER add copyright or license headers unless specifically requested. - You do not need to \`git commit\` your changes; this will be done automatically for you. - If there is a .pre-commit-config.yaml, use \`pre-commit run --files ...\` to check that your changes pass the pre-commit checks. However, do not fix pre-existing errors on lines you didn't touch. - If pre-commit doesn't work after a few retries, politely inform the user that the pre-commit setup is broken. - Once you finish coding, you must - Check \`git status\` to sanity check your changes; revert any scratch files or changes. - Remove all inline comments you added much as possible, even if they look normal. Check using \`git diff\`. Inline comments must be generally avoided, unless active maintainers of the repo, after long careful study of the code and the issue, will still misinterpret the code without the comments. - Check if you accidentally add copyright or license headers. If so, remove them. - Try to run pre-commit if it is available. - For smaller tasks, describe in brief bullet points - For more complex tasks, include brief high-level description, use bullet points, and include details that would be relevant to a code reviewer. - If completing the user's task DOES NOT require writing or modifying files (e.g., the user asks a question about the code base): - Respond in a friendly tune as a remote teammate, who is knowledgeable, capable and eager to help with coding. - When your task involves writing or modifying files: - Do NOT tell the user to "save the file" or "copy the code into a file" if you already created or modified the file using \`apply_patch\`. Instead, reference the file as already saved. - Do NOT show the full contents of large files you have already written, unless the user explicitly asks for them.`; https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-cli/src/utils/agent/agent-loop.ts https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-cli/src/util...

blt 2y ago

Sorry for being a grumpy old man, but I don't have npm on my machine and I never will. It's a bit frustrating to see more and more CLI tools depending on it.

meta_ai_x 2y ago
if OpenAI had really smart models, they would converted TS/JS apps to Go or Rust apps. Since they don't, AGI is not here
crancher 2y ago
What are your concerns?
- jensenbox 2y ago
  The entire JS ecosystem.
John23832 2y ago
I asked the same question for Anthropic's version of this. Why is all of this in JS?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- photonthug 2y ago
  Tree-sitter related bits probably
  - emporas 2y ago
    tree-sitter is a C library though. Only grammars for each particular lang are defined in javascript.
- parhamn 2y ago
  JS is web's (and "hip" developer's) python, and in many ways it is better. Also the tooling is getting a lot better (libraries, typescript, bundling, packaging, performance). One thing I wonder that could be cool: when Bun has sufficient NodeJS compatibility the should ship bun --compile versions so you dont need node/npm on the system. Then it's arguably a, "why not JS?"

gklitt 2y ago

I tried one task head-to-head with Codex o4-mini vs Claude Code: writing documentation for a tricky area of a medium-sized codebase. Claude Code did great and wrote pretty decent docs. Codex didn't do well. It hallucinated a bunch of stuff that wasn't in the code, and completely misrepresented the architecture - it started talking about server backends and REST APIs in an app that doesn't have any of that. I'm curious what went so wrong - feels like possibly an issue with loading in the right context and attending to it correctly? That seems like an area that Claude Code has really optimized for. I have high hopes for o3 and o4-mini as models so I hope that other tests show better results! Also curious to see how Cursor etc. incorporate o3.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ilaksh 2y ago
Did you try the same exact test with o3 instead? The mini models are meant for speed.
- gklitt 2y ago
  I want to but I’ve been having trouble getting o3 to work - lots of errors related to model selection.
strangescript 2y ago
Claude Code still feels superior. o4-mini has all sorts of issues. o3 is better but at that point, you aren't saving money so who cares. I feel like people are sleeping on Claude Code for one reason or another. Its not cheap, but its by far the best, most consistent experience I have had.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  > Its not cheap, but its by far the best, most consistent experience I have had. It’s too expensive for what it does though. And it starts failing rapidly when it exhausts the context window.

jensenbox 2y ago

You lost me at NPM

yetanotherjosh 2y ago
Why?

thekevan 2y ago

So even if you have a plus account, there will be a charge for the API use? I mean I kind of get it, but it does seem like they are almost penalizing people who could code in the browser with the canvas feature but prefer to use a terminal. Do I have that right?

siva7 2y ago
That's not comparable. Canvas isn't agent coding directly on your machine
- thekevan 2y ago
  I wasn't considering the agent part somehow.
thimabi 2y ago
I'd love if tools like this one were available for non-API users as well, even if we had to be rate limited at some point. But I guess OpenAI will never do it because it incentivizes people to use the ChatGPT subscriptions as a gateway for programmatic access to the models.

drivingmenuts 2y ago

Is there a way to run the model locally? I'd rather not have to pay a monthly fee, if possible.

dcre 2y ago
You don't pay monthly fee to use OpenAI models through the API. You pay per token. https://openai.com/api/pricing/ https://openai.com/api/pricing/ There are other CLI coding agents like Aider (https://aider.chat/ https://aider.chat/) that will let you point at any model. The problem is that local models are dramatically worse than these big hosted models — I have not seen anyone claim they are good enough for these kind of tools. See https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/ https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/
tdrz 2y ago
Why would they give you the model?

mgdev 2y ago

Strictly worse than Claude Code presently, but I hope since it's open source that changes quickly.

killerstorm 2y ago
Given that Claude Code only works with Sonnet 3.7 which has severe limitations, how can it be "strictly worse"?
- mgdev 2y ago
  Whatever Claude Code is doing in the client/prompting is making much better use of 3.7 than any other client I'm using that also uses 3.7. This is especially true for when you bump up against context limits; it can successfully resume with a context reset about 90% of the time. MCP Commander [0] was built almost 100% using Claude Code and pretty light intervention. I immediately felt the difference in friction when using Codex. I also spent a couple hours picking apart Codex with the goal of adding Sonnet 3.7 support (almost there). The actual agent loop they're using is very simple. Not to say that's a bad thing, but they're offloading all planning and workflow execution to the agent itself. That's probably the right end state to shoot for long-term, but given the current state of these models I've had much better success offloading task tracking to some other thing - even if that thing is just a markdown checklist. (I wrote about my experience [1] building AI Agents last year.) [0]: https://mcpcommander.com/ https://mcpcommander.com/ [1]: https://mg.dev/lessons-learned-building-ai-agents/ https://mg.dev/lessons-learned-building-ai-agents/

asadm 2y ago

These days, I usually paste my entire (or some) repo into gemini and then APPLY changes back into my code using this handy script i wrote: https://github.com/asadm/vibemode https://github.com/asadm/vibemode I have tried aider/copilot/continue/etc. But they lack in one way or the other.

brandall10 2y ago
Why not just select Gemini Pro 2.5 in Copilot with Edit mode? Virtually unlimited use without extra fees. Copilot used to be useless, but over the last few months has become quite excellent once edit mode was added.
- asadm 2y ago
  copilot (and others) try to be too smart and do context reduction (to save their own wallets). I want ENTIRETY of the files I attached to context, not RAG-ed version of it.
  - brandall10 2y ago
    FWIW, Edit mode gives the impression of doing this, vs. originally only passing the context visible from the open window. You can choose files to include and they don't appear to be truncated in any way. Though to be fair, I haven't checked the network traffic, but it appears to operate in this fashion from day to day use.
    - asadm 2y ago
      i will try again but last i tried adding folder to edit mode and asking it to list down files it sees, it didn't list them all down.
      - brandall10 2y ago
        I like to use "Open Editors". That way, it's only the code I'm currently working on that is added to the context, seems more a more natural way to work.

zora_goron 2y ago

Anyone have any anecdotes on how expensive this is to operate, ie compared to performing the same task via Claude Code?

mrcwinn 2y ago
A one line change, that took a decent amount of reasoning to get to for a large codebase, cost $3.57 just now. I used the o3 model. The quality and the reasoning was excellent. Cheaper than an engineer.
- john2x 2y ago
  Technically it’s more expensive, because it cost engineer + $3.57 :)

CSMastermind 2y ago

Hopefully it works better Claude Code which was an absolute nightmare to set up and run on Windows.

slig 2y ago
It doesn't support Windows, you have to use WSL as well.

andrewrn 2y ago

Uhhhh. I just get ratelimited almost immediately when using codex. Like I can't get even a single "explain this codebase" or simple feature change. I am on the lowest usage tier, granted. But this tool is unusable without being on a higher tier, which requires me to spend $50 in credits to access...

kumarm 2y ago

First experience is not great. Here are the issues to start using codex: 1. Default model used doesn't work and you get error: system OpenAI rejected the request (request ID: req_06727eaf1c5d1e3f900760d10ca565a7). Please verify your settings and try again. 2. You have to switch to model o4-mini-2025-04-16 or some other model using /model. Now if you exit codex, you are back to default model and again have to switch everytime. 3. Crashed the first time with NodeJS error. But after initial hickups seems to work and still checking how good/bad it is compared to claude code (which I love except for context size limits)

jwrallie 2y ago

> Does it work on Windows? > Not directly. It requires Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) – Codex has been tested on macOS and Linux with Node ≥ 22. I've been seeing similar things in different projects lately. WSL in long term seems to be reducing the scope of what people decide to develop natively on Windows. Seeing the pressure to move "apps" to the Windows Store, VSCode connecting to remote (or WSL) for development, and Azure, it does seem intentional.

throwaway314155 2y ago
The developer experience of linux is simply more popular.

noidesto 2y ago

I've had great results with the Amazon Q developer cli, ever since it became agentic. I believe it's using claude-3.7-sonnet under the hood.

094459 2y ago
+1 this has become my go to cli tool now, very impressed with it
sagarpatil 2y ago
How does it compare to Claude Code
- noidesto 2y ago
  I haven't used Claude Code. But one major difference is Q Cli is $19/month with generous limits.

jamesy0ung 2y ago

It's a real shame sandbox-exec is deprecated.

est 2y ago

If anyone else is wondering, it's not a local model, it uploads your code to online API. Great tool for open-source projects, but careful with anything you don't want be public

ramoz 2y ago

Claude Code represents something far more than a coding capability to me. It can do anything a human can do within a terminal. It’s exceptionally good at coding. Amazing software, really, I’m sure the cost hurdles will be resolved. Yet still often worth the spend

stitched2gethr 2y ago
> It can do anything a human can do within a terminal. This.. isn't true.

danra 2y ago

Am I the only one underwhelmed by Claude Code (which most comments here claim is better than Codex)? Anecdotal experience: asked it to change instances of a C++ class Foo to a compatible one Bar, it did that but failed to add the required include where it made the change. Yes, I'm sure that with enough prompting/hand-holding it could do this fine. Is it too much to expect basics like this out of the box, though? If so, then I, for one, still can't relate to the current level of enthusiasm.

dgunay 2y ago

This is a decent start. The sandboxing functionality is a really cool idea but can run into problems (e.g. with Go build cache being outside of the repository).

usecodenaija 2y ago

So, OpenAI’s Codex CLI is Claude Code, but worse? Cursor-Agent-Tools > Claude Code > Codex CLI https://pypi.org/project/cursor-agent-tools/ https://pypi.org/project/cursor-agent-tools/

killerstorm 2y ago
This tool has nothing to do with Cursor. Very misleading to use popular brand like that, possible scam.
- usecodenaija 2y ago
  Maybe read the docs before replying: Cursor Agent Tools is a Python-based AI agent that replicates Cursor's coding assistant capabilities, enabling function calling, code generation, and intelligent coding assistance with Claude, OpenAI, and locally hosted Ollama models. https://github.com/civai-technologies/cursor-agent https://github.com/civai-technologies/cursor-agent
  - killerstorm 2y ago
    Being inspired by someone's work DOES NOT give you right to use their trade mark. It's like making a new operating system and calling it Windows because you "replicate" capabilities of MS Windows. Please read about trademark law.
yetanotherjosh 2y ago
Astroturfing alert. This comment author is also the author of cursor-agent-tools.
oulipo 2y ago
I've been quite unimpressed by Codex for now... even the quality of the code is worse than Claude for me
submeta 2y ago
Never heared of Cursor Agent tools. And that is better than Claude Caude according to whom? Genuinely curious.

shekhargulati 2y ago

Not sure why they used React for a CLI. The code in the repo feels like it was written by an LLM—too many inline comments. Interestingly, their agent's system prompt mentions removing inline comments https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-cli/src/utils/agent/agent-loop.ts#L1057 https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-cli/src/util.... > - Remove all inline comments you added as much as possible, even if they look normal. Check using \`git diff\`. Inline comments must be generally avoided, unless active maintainers of the repo, after long careful study of the code and the issue, will still misinterpret the code without the comments.

kristianp 2y ago
I find it irritating too when companies use react for a command line utility. I think its just my preference for anything else but javascript.

sim7c00 2y ago

notes "Zero setup — bring your OpenAI API key and it just works!" requires NPM >.>

romanovcode 2y ago

Tried it out on a relatively large Angular project. > explain this codebase to me > doing things and thinking for about 3 minutes > error: rate_limit_exceeded Yeah, not the best experience.

jackchina 2y ago

Claude Code has outstanding performance in code understanding and web page generation stability, thanks to its deep context modeling and architecture-aware mechanism, especially when dealing with legacy systems, it can accurately restore component relationships. Although Codex CLI (o4-mini) is open source and responsive, its hallucination problems in complex architectures may be related to the compression strategy of the sparse expert hybrid architecture and the training goal of prioritizing generation speed. OpenAI is optimizing Codex CLI by integrating the context control capabilities of Windsurf IDE, and plans to introduce a hybrid inference pipeline in the o3-pro version to reduce the hallucination rate.

p3rry 2y ago

I had built this few weeks back on same thought https://github.com/shubhamparamhans/Associate-AI-EM/ https://github.com/shubhamparamhans/Associate-AI-EM/

baalimago 2y ago

You can try out the same thing in my homemade tool clai[1]. Just run `clai -cm gpt-4.1 -tools query Analyze this repository`. Benefit of clai: you can swap out to practically any model, from any vendor. Just change `-cm gpt-4.1` to, for example, `-cm claude-3-7-sonnet-latest`. Detriments of clai: it's a hobby project, much less flashy, designed after my own usecases with not that much attention put into anyone else [1]: https://github.com/baalimago/clai https://github.com/baalimago/clai

WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago

typescript & npm slopware... i can't believe it and i can't believe nobody else is complaining my simulation is definitely on very hard mode

999900000999 2y ago

From my experience with playing with Claude Code vs Cline( which is open source and the tool to beat imo). I don't want anything that doesn't let me set my own models. Deepseek is about 1/20th of the price and only slightly behind Claude. Both have a tendency to over engineer. It's like a junior engineer who treats LOC as a KPI.

AllSuperIndians 2y ago

[dead]

kristianp 2y ago

I've been using Aider, it was irritating to use (couldn't supply changes in the diff format) until I switched away from chatgpt-4o to Claude 3.7 and then Gemini 2.5. This is admittedly for a small project. Gpt 4.1 should do better with the diff format so I will give it a go.