The Codex App

https://openai.com/index/introducing-the-codex-app/

by meetpateltech • 6 months ago

805 636 6 months ago

drcongo• 6 months ago

We're also excited to show more people what's now possible with Codex . For a limited time we're including Codex with ChatGPT Free and Go, and we're doubling the rate limits on Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu plans.

Translated from Marketingspeak, this is presumably "we're also desperate for some people to actually use it because everyone shrugged and went back to Claude Code when we released it".

embedding-shape3• 6 months ago

I dunno, feels like the models have different weak/strong points, sometimes I can sit with Claude Code for an hour with some issue, try it with Codex and have it solved in five minutes, and also the opposite happens. I tend to use Codex mostly when I care more about correctness and not missing anything, Claude when it's more important I do it fast and I know exactly what it needs to do, Codex seems to require less hand-holding. Of course, just anecdotal.

sigbottle• 6 months ago

GPT models definitely seem stronger when they "get it" and in the types of problems they "get", while claude seems more holistic but not "as smart" as some of the spikes GPT can get.

MattDamonSpace• 6 months ago

They also claim 2x usage from December (though 2x a tiny amount is still a tiny amount)

alansaber2• 6 months ago

Yeah this is clearly just a marketing re-release but if they've executed well i'm happy to try it

SunshineTheCat2• 6 months ago

This does look like it would simplify some aspects of using Codex on Mac, however, when I first saw the headline I thought this was going to be a phone app. And that started running a whole list of ideas through my brain... :(

But overall, looks very nice and I'm looking forward to giving it a try.

tomashubelbauer5• 6 months ago

I don't know why any frontier model lab can't ship a mobile app that doesn't use a cloud VM but is able to connect to your laptop/server and work against local files on there when on the same network (e.g.: on TailScale). Or even better act as a remote control for a harness running on that remote device, so you couldn't seamlessly switch between phone and laptop/server.

kzahel3• 6 months ago

I'm also so baffled by this. I had to write my own app to be able to do seamless handoff between my laptop/desktop/phone and it works for me (https://github.com/kzahel/yepanywhere - nice web interface for claude using their SDK, MIT, E2E relay included, no tailscale required) but I'm so baffled why this isn't first priority. Why all these desktop apps?

geooff_• 6 months ago

Having dictation and worktree support built in is nice. Currently there is a whole ecosystem of tools implementing similar functionality for Claude Code. The automations look cool too!

strongpigeon5• 6 months ago

Genuinely excited to try this out. I've started using Codex much more heavily in the past two months and honestly, it's been shockingly good. Not perfect mind you, but it keeps impressing me with what it's able to "get". It often gets stuff wrong, and at times runs with faulty assumptions, but overall it's no worse than having average L3-L4 engs at your disposal.

That being said, the app is stuck at the launch screen, with "Loading projects..." taking forever...

Edit: A lot of links to documentation aren't working yet. E.g.: https://developers.openai.com/codex/guides/environments. My current setup involves having a bunch of different environments in their own VMs using Tart and using VS Code Remote for each of them. I'm not married to that setup, but I'm curious how it handles multiple environments.

Edit 2: Link is working now. Looks like I might have to tweak my setup to have port offsets instead of running VMs.

SunshineTheCat2• 6 months ago

Same here. From my experience, codex usually knocks backend/highly "logical?" tasks out of the park while fairly basic front-end/UI tasks it stumbles over at times.

But overall it does seem to be consistently improving. Looking to see how this makes it easier to work with.

adithyassekhar2• 6 months ago

Backend, regardless of language or framework are often set in stone. There's a well defined/most used way for everything. Especially since most apps when reduced is CRUD. Frontend by the nature of how frontend works, can be completely different from project to project if one wants to architect it efficiently.

xiphias22• 6 months ago

Cool, looks like I'll stay on Cursor. All alternatives come out buggy, they care a lot about developer experience.

BTW OpenAI should think a bit about polishing their main apps instead of trying to come out with new ones while the originals are still buggy.

embirico4• 6 months ago

(I work on Codex) One detail you might appreciate is that we built the app with a ton of code sharing with the CLI (as core agent harness) and the VSCode extension (UI layer), so that as we improve any of those, we polish them all.

dkundel2• 6 months ago

Hey thank you for calling out the broken link. That should be fixed now. Will make sure to track down the other broken links. We'll track down why loading is taking a while for you. Should definitely be snappier.

wahnfrieden2• 6 months ago

Is this the only announcement for Apple platform devs?

I thought Codex team tweeted about something coming for Xcode users - but maybe it just meant devs who are Apple users, not devs working on Apple platform apps...

raw_anon_11116• 6 months ago

I have the $20 a month subscription for ChatGPT and the $200/year subscription to Claude (company reimbursed).

I have yet to hit usage limits with Codex. I continuously reach it with Claude. I use them both the same way - hands on the wheel and very interactive, small changes and tell them both to update a file to keep up with what’s done and what to do as I test.

Codex gets caught in a loop more often trying to fix an issue. I tell it to summarize the issue, what it’s tried and then I throw Claude at it.

Claude can usually fix it. Once it is fixed, I tell Claude to note in the same file and then go back to Codex

motbus3• 6 months ago

I will say that doing small modifications or asking a bunch of stuff fills the context the same in my observations. It depends on your codebase and the rest of stuff you use (sub agents, skills, etc)

I was once minimising the changes and trying to take the max of it. I did an uncountable numbers of tests and and variations. Didn't really matter much if I told it to do it all or change one line. I feel Claude code tries to fill the context as fast as possible anyway

I am not sure how worth Claude is right now. I still prefer that rather than codex, but I am starting to feel that's just a bias

strongpigeon5• 6 months ago

The trick to reach the usage limit is to run many agents in parallel. Not that it’s an explicit goal of mine but I keep thinking of this blog post [0] and then try to get Codex to do as much for me as possible in parallel

[0] http://theoryofconstraints.blogspot.com/2007/06/toc-stories-...

petesergeant• 6 months ago

I have a found Codex to be an exceptional code-reviewer of Claude's work.

650REDHAIR• 6 months ago

I hit the Claude limit within an hour.

Most of my tokens are used arguing with the hallucinations.

I’ve given up on it.

Areibman• 6 months ago

Your goal should be to run agents all the time, all in parallel. If you’re not hitting limits, you’re massively underutilizing the VC intelligence subsidy

https://hyperengineering.bottlenecklabs.com/p/the-infinite-m...

samuelstros2• 6 months ago

It's basically what Emdash (https://www.emdash.sh/), Conductor (https://www.conductor.build/) & CO have been building but as first class product from OpenAI.

Begs the question if Anthropic will follow up with a first-class Claude Code "multi agent" (git worktree) app themselves.

FanaHOVA• 6 months ago

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/desktop

samuelstros2• 6 months ago

oh i didn't know that claude code has a desktop app already

IMTDb• 6 months ago

Maybe a dumb question on my side; but if you are using a GUI like emdash with Claude Code, are you getting the full claude code harness under the hood or are you "just" leveraging the model ?

arnestrickmann• 6 months ago

Emdash is inducing CC, Codex, etc. natively. Therefore users are getting the raw version of each agent.

atestu• 6 months ago

I can answer for Conductor: you're getting the full Claude Code, it's just a GUI wrapper on top of CC. It makes it easy to create worktrees (1 click) and manage them.

mritchie712• 6 months ago

yeah, I wanted a better terminal for operating many TUI agent's at once and none of these worked because they all want to own the agent.

I ended up building a terminal[0] with Tauri and xterm that works exactly how I want.

0 - screenshot: https://x.com/thisritchie/status/2016861571897606504?s=20

asdev2• 6 months ago

They have Claude Code web in research preview

dbbk2• 6 months ago

It still doesn't support plan mode... I'm really confused why that's so hard to do

desireco422• 6 months ago

I never heard of Emdash before and I am following on AI tools closely. It just shows you how much noise there is and how hard is to promote the apps. Emdash looks solid. I almost went to build something similar because I wasn't aware of it.

another_twist3• 6 months ago

I am not sure if multi agent approach is what it is hyped up to be. As long we are working on parallel work streams with defined contracts (say an agreed upon API def that backend implements and frontend uses), I'd assume that running independent agent coding sessions is faster and in fact more desirable so that neither side bends the code to comply with under specified contracts.

sepositus2• 6 months ago

Usually I find the hype is centered around creating software no one cares about. If you're creating a prototype for dozens of investors to demo - I seriously doubt you'd take the "mainstream" approach.

krzyzanowskim• 6 months ago

until then, the https://CommanderAI.app tries to fill the gap on Mac

miroljub3• 6 months ago

Given the prevalence of Opencode and its ability to use any model and provider I don't see reason why would anyone bother with random vendors half-assed tools.

TZubiri2• 6 months ago

Are you calling OpenAI a random vendor?

That's like calling Coca Cola a random beverage vendor

miroljub3• 6 months ago

Yes, OpenAI is a random development tool vendor. In the same way Volkswagen is a random sausage vendor.

Do you drink your Coca Cola directly from the Coca Cola packaged bottle?

Or do you prefer to sip it in the cup of your choice and drink it from there? The same cup you use to drink Pepsi, Fanta, milk, and other beverages.

spiderice• 6 months ago

For starters, money. There is no better value out there that I'm aware of than Claude Code Max. Claude Code also just works way better than Opencode, in my experience. Though I know there are those that have experienced the exact opposite.

miroljub3• 6 months ago

I find Claude Code bloated and a bit clunky. Those same Claude models work better in Opencode, where I can also combine them with other providers.

The fact that Anthropic recently started blocking their coding plans usage from other tools is telling. They are in the phase where they realize they can't compete in an open field and need to go back behind their fortress gates and hope to endure a siege from the stronger opponents.

minimaxir• 6 months ago

The inclusion of a live vibe-coded game on the webpage is fun, except the game barely works and it's odd they didn't attempt any polish/QA for what is ostensibly a PR announcement. It just adds more fuel to the fire to the argument that vibecoding results in AI slop.

alansaber2• 6 months ago

To be fair the premise is that they 1 shotted it. I'd just be suspicious if it were any better (the POC is that is just about works)

guywithahat• 6 months ago

I agree, if it had been polished I would have not trusted the demo at all, the fact it shows what you can potentially expect from a one-shot is cooler.

surrTurr3• 6 months ago

- looks like OpenAIs answer to Claude Code Desktop / Cowork

- workspace agent runner apps (like Conductor) get more and more obsolete

- "vibe working" is becoming a thing - people use folder based agents to do their work (not just coding)

- new workflows seem to be evolving into folder based workspaces, where agents can self-configure MCP servers and skills + memory files and instructions

kinda interested to see if openai has the ideas & shipping power to compete with anthropic going forward; anthropic does not only have an edge over openai because of how op their models are at coding, but also because they innovate on workflows and ai tooling standards; openai so far has only followed in adoption (mcp, skills, now codex desktop) but rarely pushed the SOTA themselves.

OkGoDoIt• 6 months ago

Also interesting that they are both only for macOS. I’m feeling a bit left out on the Windows and Linux side, but this seems like an ongoing trend.

surrTurr3• 6 months ago

my guess is that openai/anthropic employees work on macOS and mostly vibe code these new applications (be it Atlas browser or now Codex Desktop); i wouldn't be surprised if Codex Desktop was built in a month or less;

linux / windows requires extra testing as well as some adjustments to the software stack (e.g. liquid glass only works on mac); to get the thing out the door ASAP, they release macos first.

abshkbh• 6 months ago

We did train Codex models natively on Windows - https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-2-codex/ (and even 5.1-codex-max)

scottyah• 6 months ago

A lot of companies that use Windows are likely to use Microsoft Office products, and they were all basically forced to sign a non-compete where they can't run other models- just copilot.

RazerWazer• 6 months ago

I'm so sick and tired of the macOS elitism in the AI/LLM world.

solomatov• 6 months ago

Is it open source? Do they disclose which framework they use for the GUI? Is it Electron or Tauri?

surrTurr3• 6 months ago

lol ofc not

looks like the same framework they used to build chatgpt desktop (electron)

edit - from another comment:

Hi! Romain here, I work on Codex at OpenAI. We totally hear you. The team actually built the app in Electron specifically so we can support Windows and Linux as well. We shipped macOS first, but Windows is coming very soon. Appreciate you calling this out. Stay tuned!

xiphias22• 6 months ago

I guess the next it was meant to happen...I tried Google's Antigravity and found it quite buggy.

May give a go at this and Claude Code desktop as well, but Cursor guys are still working the hardest to keep themselves alive.

fanyangxyz33• 6 months ago

I really look forward to using this. I tried Codex first time yesterday and it was able to complete a task (i.e. drawing Penrose tilings) that Claude Code previously failed at. Also a little overwhelmed by all the new features that this app brings. I feel that I'm behind all the fancy new tools.

joe87564382• 6 months ago

Is there any marked difference or benefit over Claude Code?

RA_Fisher• 6 months ago

It’s possible to run up to 4 agents at once vs. Claude Code’s single thread. Sometimes I’ll find meaningful quality differences between what agents produce.

joe87564382• 6 months ago

Interesting. Has anyone found running multiple parallel agents useful in practice?

xGrill• 6 months ago

Is this not just a skinned version of Goose: https://block.github.io/goose/

cobolexpert• 6 months ago

In the end this and all other 89372304 AI projects are just OpenAPI/Anthropic API wrappers, but at least one has 1st party support which maybe gives it a slight advantage?

falloutx4• 6 months ago

they are all copies of each other. Did you expect them to build something completely new? Software Development is stuck in an AI hole where we only build AI features.

simianwords• 6 months ago

I really want to like the native Mac app aesthetic but I kinda hate it. It screams minimalist but also clearly tells me it’s not meant for a power user. That ruggedness and sensitivity is missing.

asdev2• 6 months ago

Built an open source lightweight version of this that works with any cli agent: https://github.com/built-by-as/FleetCode

FergusArgyll3• 6 months ago

and we're doubling the rate limits on Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu plans.

I love competition

mdrzn• 6 months ago

Maybe it's because I'm not used to the flow, but I prefer to work directly on the machine where I'm logged in via ssh, instead of working "somewhere in a git tree", and then have to deploy/test/etc.

Once this app (or a similar app by Anthropic) will allow me to have the same level of "orchestration" but on a remote machine, I'll test it.

indigodaddy5• 6 months ago

Not going to solve your exact problem but I started this project with this approach in mind

https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin

vzaliva• 6 months ago

How about us, Linux users? This is Mac only. Do they plan to support CLI version with all the features they are adding to desktop app?

romainhuet5• 6 months ago

Hi! Romain here, I work at OpenAI. The team actually built the Codex app in Electron so we can support both Windows and Linux very soon. Stay tuned!

kurtis_reed• 6 months ago

Let me guess, you use MacOS yourself?

freedomben• 6 months ago

Nice, thank you for sharing!

tonkinai• 6 months ago

Do you plan to release a build for Mac Intel?

AlexCoventry2• 6 months ago

Are you planning to open-source it?

miscend4• 6 months ago

Would it be tricky to make an Intel Mac build?

goniszewski• 6 months ago

Guess MacOS gives you pass for early-access stuff, right? /s

From a developer's perspective it makes sense, though. You can test experimental stuff where configurations are almost the same in terms of OS and underlying hardware, so no weird, edge-case bugs at this stage.

wutwutwat• 6 months ago

not only is it mac only, it appears to be arm only as well. App won't launch on my intel mac

Rudybega• 6 months ago

Yeah, I'm having the same issue. Disappointing limitations.

miscend4• 6 months ago

there a non official script to get it running on intel https://github.com/Miscend/codex-rebuilder

barbazoo2• 6 months ago

"Localize my app and add the option to change units"

To me this still feels like the wrong way to interact with a coding agent. Does this lead people to success? I've never seen it not go off the rails in some way unless you provide clear boundaries as to what the scope of the expected change is. It's gonna write code if you don't even want it to yet, it's gonna write the test first or the logic first, whichever you don't want it to do. It'll be much too verbose or much too hacky, etc.

barbazoo2• 6 months ago

And then

gh-address-comments address comments

Inspiring stuff. I would love to be the one writing GH comments here. /s

But maybe there's a complementary gh-leave-comments to have it review PRs for you too.

pests2• 6 months ago

I've had no issues with prompts like that. I use Cursor with their plan mode, so I get a nice markdown file to iterate on or edit myself before it actually does anything.

the_sleaze_• 6 months ago

100%

First phase: Plan. Mandatory to complete, as well as get AI feedback from a separate context or model. Iterate until complete.

Only then move on to the Second Phase: make edits.

Better planning == Better execution

rdn• 6 months ago

The better models can handle that prompt assuming there is an existing clean codebase and the scope of the task is not too large. The existing code can act as an implicit boundary.

Weaker models give your experience, or when using a 100% LLM codebase I think it can end up in a hall of mirrors.

Now I have an idea to try, have a 2nd LLM processing pass that normalizes the vibe-code to some personal style and standard to break it out of the Stack Overflow snippet maze it can get itself in.

aed• 6 months ago

I typically bounce between Claude Code and Codex for the same project, and generally enjoy using both to check each other.

One cool thing about this: upon installing it immediately found all previous projects I've used with Codex and has those projects in the sidebar with all of the "threads" (sessions) I've had with Codex on these projects!

ngrilly2• 6 months ago

Currently using opencode with Codex 5.2 and wondering why I should switch.

oneneptune• 6 months ago

I'm a Claude Code user primarily. The best UI based orchestrator I've used is Zenflow by Zencoder.ai -- I am in no way affiliated with them, but their UI / tool can connect to any model or service you have. They offer their own model but I've not used it.

What I like is that the sessions are highly configurable from their plan.md which translates a md document into a process. So you can tweak and add steps. This is similar to some of the other workflow tools I've seen around hooks and such -- but presented in a way that is easy for me to use. I also like that it can update the plan.md as it goes to dynamically add steps and even add "hooks" as needed based on the problem.

sepositus2• 6 months ago

Always sounds so interesting and then I do a search only to found out it's another product trying to sell you your 20th "AI credit package." I really don't see how these apps will last that long. I pay for the big three already - and no I don't want to cancel them just so I can use your product.

cactusplant7374• 6 months ago

Aren't there 500+ aggregator services?

sergiotapia• 6 months ago

No Linux support? :(

oompydoompy74• 6 months ago

Looks like they forgot the part of the code editor where you can… edit code. Claude Code in Zed is about the most optimal experience I can imagine. I want the agent on the side and a code editor in the middle.

elAhmo2• 6 months ago

Usage like this is becoming a rarity. Most people are editing significantly less and "agent interfaces" are slowly taking the focus.

verdverm4• 6 months ago

"most" people aren't even using AI yet

Of those that are, most are not vibe coding, so an editor is still required at many points

ativzzz2• 6 months ago

For greenfield apps you can vibecode it. For existing complex apps, where existing products where customers pay us a lot of money for working software, understanding the changes and context surrounding them in the code is critical or else nobody knows how the system works anymore and maintenance and support becomes impossible.

hmate9• 6 months ago

That’s not really a negative for me as I can easily jump into vscode where I already have my workspace for coding set up exactly as I like it. This being a completely separate app just to get the agentic work right is a good direction imo

falloutx4• 6 months ago

Yeah but its annoying to find the file the agent just edited without any IDE/editor integration, you have to add that command which opens the file in vscode after editing.

layer8• 6 months ago

It would be nice to have an integrated development environment.

mellosouls2• 6 months ago

Mac only. Again.

Apple is great but this is OpenAI devs showing their disconnect from the mainstream. Its complacent at best, contemptuous at worst.

SamA or somebody really needs to give the product managers here a kick up the arse.

dkundel2• 6 months ago

Windows is almost ready. It's already running but we are solving a few more things before the release to make sure it works well.

romainhuet5• 6 months ago

Hi! Romain here, I work on Codex at OpenAI. We totally hear you. The team actually built the app in Electron specifically so we can support Windows and Linux as well. We shipped macOS first, but Windows is coming very soon. Appreciate you calling this out. Stay tuned!

embirico4• 6 months ago

Only thing i'd add re windows is it's taking us some time to get really solid sandboxing working on Windows, where there are fewer OS-level primitives for it. There's some more at https://developers.openai.com/codex/windows and we'd love help with testing and feedback to make it robust.

Oras3• 6 months ago

Curios why electron not native?

Wouldn’t native give better performance and more system integration?

anonymous9082133• 6 months ago

Electron? Why can't Codex write, or at least translate, your application to native code instead of using a multi-hundred-mb browser wrapper to display text? Is this the future of software engineering Codex is promising me?

EastSmith• 6 months ago

Really hoped you'd say Linux next.

tptacek• 6 months ago

If you were going to release a product for developers as soon as it was ready for developers to try, such that you could only launch on one platform and then follow up later with the rest, macOS is the obvious choice. There's nothing contemptuous about that.

nashashmi• 6 months ago

Check out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46829029

mellosouls2• 6 months ago

Kudos to the OpenAI reps for responding to my comment and doing so politely.

My ire was provoked by this following on from the Windows ChatGPT app that was just a container for the webpage compared to the earlier bells and whistles Mac app. Perceptions are built on those sorts of decisions.

piskov2• 6 months ago

Because of that windows had thinking budget selectors for months before ios and macos (those got this only last week)

justkez• 6 months ago

Genuinely curious if people would just let this rip with no obvious isolation?

I’m aware Mac OS has some isolation/sandboxes but without running codex via docker I wouldn’t be running codex.

(Appreciate there are still risks)

davidcann• 6 months ago

Shameless plug, but you can sandbox codex cli without a container using my macOS app: https://multitui.com

nkohari3• 6 months ago

This is a really nice tool! (Also, I love the old school animated GIFs in the site's footer.)

embirico4• 6 months ago

(I work on Codex) We have a robust sandbox for macOS and Linux. Not quite yet for Windows, but working on that! Docs: https://developers.openai.com/codex/security

realityfactchex• 6 months ago

I wouldn't trust it. I'm moving to always running AI coding in a full VM.

daviding2• 6 months ago

This looks interesting and I use Codex a fair bit already in vscode etc, but I'm having trouble leaving a 'code editor with AI' to an environment that sort of looks like it puts the code as a hidden secondary artefact. I guess the key thing is the multi agent spinning plates part.

embirico4• 6 months ago

(I work on Codex) I think for us the big unlock was GPT-5.2 and GPT-5.2-Codex, where we found ourselves needing to make many fewer manual edits.

daviding2• 6 months ago

I find that the case too. For more complex things my future ask would be something that perhaps formalized verification/testing into the AI dev cycle? My confidence in not needing to see code is directly proportional in my level of comfort in test coverage (even if quite high level UI/integration mechanisms rather than 1 != 0 unit stuff)

austinhutch• 6 months ago

I'm managing context with codex inside VSCode using different threads. I'm trying to figure out if there are use cases where I'd rather be in this app.

kblissett• 6 months ago

Does this support users who access Codex via Azure OpenAI API keys?

adav2• 6 months ago

Yes using the config.toml setup

robmn• 6 months ago

This is so garbage. OpenAI is never catching up.

eamag• 6 months ago

For a limited time, Codex will also be available to ChatGPT Free and Go users to help build more with agents. We’re also doubling rate limits for existing Codex users across all paid plans during this period.

Is there more information about it? For how long and what are the limits?

wahnfrieden2• 6 months ago

allpratik• 6 months ago

They are probably providing it for free for 1 month.

thefounder3• 6 months ago

How is this better than vscode with the codex extension?

calebm• 6 months ago

Thanks for asking this - I had the same question.

e1g2• 6 months ago

Wow, this is nearly an exact copy of Codex Monitor[1]: voice mode, project + threads/agents, git panel, PR button, terminal drawer, IDE integrations, local/worktree/cloud edits, archiving threads, etc.

[1] https://github.com/Dimillian/CodexMonitor

laborcontract3• 6 months ago

Codex Monitor seems like an Antigravity Agent Manager clone. It came out after, too.

Bunch of the features u listed were already in the codex extension too. False outrage it its finest.

e1g2• 6 months ago

I have both Codex Monitor and this new Codex app open side by side right now; aside from the theme, I struggle to tell them apart. Antigravity's Agent Manager is obviously different, but these two are twins.

verdverm4• 6 months ago

Antigravity is a white labeled $2B pork of Windsurf, so it really starts there, but maybe someone knows what windsurf derived from to keep the chain going?

Oras3• 6 months ago

I’ve been using codex regularly and it’s pretty good at model extra high with pretty generous context.

From the video, I can see how this app would be useful in:

- Creating branches without having to open another terminal, or creating a new branch before the session.

- Seeing diff in the same app.

- working on multiple sessions at once without switching CLI

- I quite like the “address the comments”, I can see how this would be valuable

I will give it a try for sure

nycdatasci• 6 months ago

The landing page for the demo game "Voxel Velocity" mentions "<Enter> start" at the bottom, but <Enter> actually changes selection. One would think that after 7mm tokens and use of a QA agent, they would catch something like this.

anematode2• 6 months ago

It's interesting, isn't it? On the one hand the game is quite impressive. Although it doesn't have anything particularly novel (and it shouldn't, given the prompt), it still would have taken me several days, probably a week, working nonstop. On the other hand, there's plenty of paper cuts.

I think these subtle issues are just harder to provide a "harness" for, like a compiler or rigorous test suite that lets the LLM converge toward a good (if sometimes inelegant) solution. Probably a finer-tuned QA agent would have changed the final result.

why_at• 6 months ago

It's also interesting how the functionality of the game barely changes between 60k tokens, 800k tokens, and 7MM tokens. It seems like the additional tokens made the game look more finished, but it plays almost exactly the same in all of them.

I wonder what it was doing with all those tokens?

zamadatix• 6 months ago

I'd bet the initial token usage is all net new while the later token usage probably has reading+regenerating significant portions of the project for individual minor changes/fixes.

E.g. I wouldn't be surprised if identifying the lack of touch screen support on the menu, feeding it in, and then regenerating the menu code sometime between 800k and 7MM took a lot of tokens.

mazswojejzony• 6 months ago

Sadly, my own small game-dev adventures look similar: I can implement the core mechanics fairly quickly, but polishing the game takes ages.

UPDATE: without AI usage at all (just to clarify).

freeqaz• 6 months ago

Does anybody know when Codex is going to roll out subagent support? That has been an absolute game changer in Claude Code. It lets me run with a single session for so much longer and chip away at much more complex tasks. This was my biggest pain point when I used Codex last week.

laborcontract3• 6 months ago

It's already out.

turblety• 6 months ago

Can you explain how to use it? I’ve tried asking it to do “create 3 files using multiple sub agents” and other similar wording. It never works.

Is it in the main Codex build? There doesn’t seem to be an experiment for it.

https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/2604

nr378• 6 months ago

Looks like another Claude App/Cowork-type competitor with slightly different tradeoffs (Cowork just calls Claude Code in a VM, this just calls Codex CLI with OS sandboxing).

Here's the Codex tech stack in case anyone was interested like me.

Framework: Electron 40.0.0

Frontend:

- React 19.2.0

- Jotai (state management)

- TanStack React Form

- Vite (bundler)

- TypeScript

Backend/Main Process:

- Node.js

- better-sqlite3 (local database)

- node-pty (terminal emulation)

- Zod (validation)

- Immer (immutable state)

Build & Dev:

- pnpm (package manager)

- Electron Forge

- Vitest (testing)

- ESLint + Prettier

Native/macOS:

- Sparkle (auto-updates)

- Squirrel (installer)

- electron-liquid-glass (macOS vibrancy effects)

- Sentry (error tracking)

dcre• 6 months ago

The use of the name Codex and the focus on diffs and worktrees suggests this is still more dev-focused than Cowork.

nxobject• 6 months ago

It's a smart move – while Codex has the same aspirations, limiting it to savvy power users will likely lead to better feedback, and less catastrophic misuse.

epolanski2• 6 months ago

They have the same stack of a boot camper, quite telling.

elpakal2• 6 months ago

this just calls Codex CLI with OS sandboxing

The git and terminal views are a big plus for me. I usually have those open and active in addition to my codex CLI sessions.

Excited to try skills, too.

another_twist3• 6 months ago

Is the integration with Sentry native or via MCP ?

hdjrudni5• 6 months ago

What does Sentry via MCP even mean? You want the LLM to call Sentry itself whenever it encounters an error?

firemelt2• 6 months ago

wow where did you find the stack? how about claude app stack?

lacoolj• 6 months ago

OpenAI, ChatGPT, Codex

So many of the things that pioneered the way for the truly good (Claude, Gemini) to evolve. I am thankful for what they have done.

But the quality is gone, and they are now in catch-up mode. This is clear, not just from the quality of GPT-5.x outputs, but from this article.

They launch something new, flashy, should get the attention of all of us. And yet, they only launch to Apple devices?

Then, there are typos in the article. Again. I can't believe they would be sloppy about this with so much on the line. EDIT: since I know someone will ask, couple of examples - "7MM Tokens", "...this prompt initial prompt..."

And why are they not giving the full prompt used for these examples? "...that we've summarized for clarity" but we want to see the actual prompt. How unclear do we need to make our prompts to get to the level that you're showing us? Slight red flag there.

Anyway, good luck to them, and I hope it improves! Happy to try it out when it does, or at the very least, when it exists for a platform I own.

rirze2• 6 months ago

Not sure when you last evaluated the tools, but I strongly prefer Codex to Claude Code and Gemini.

Codex gets complex tasks right and I don't keep hitting usage limits constantly. (this is comparing the 20$ ChatGPT to the 200$ Claude Pro Max plans fwiw)

The tooling around ChatGPT and Codex is less, but their models are far more dependable imo than Antropic's at this very moment.

touristtam• 6 months ago

I am not sure how those TUI are going to fare against multi providers ones like opencode.

girvo2• 6 months ago

I don’t hit Codex limits because it’s so much slower, is what I’ve found personally.

deepfriedbits2• 6 months ago

I can't speak to the typos, but launching first for MacOS not something new for OpenAI. They did the same with their dedicated desktop client.

halflings2• 6 months ago

The main thing I noticed in the video is that they have heavily sped up all the code generation sections... seems to be on 5x speed or more. (because people got used to how fast and good Sonnet, and especially Gemini 3.0 Flash, are)

nl• 6 months ago

truly good (Claude, Gemini) to evolve

Claude yes, but Codex is much better than Gemini in every way that matters except speed in my experience.

Gemini 3 Flash is an amazing model, but Gemini 3 Pro isn't great. It can do good work, but it's pretty random if it will or it will go off the rails and do completely the wrong thing. OTOH GPT 5.2 Codex with high thinking is the best model currently available (slightly better than Opus 4.5)

adeelk93• 6 months ago

What’s the “7MM Tokens” typo?

lvl1552• 6 months ago

Bugs me they treat MacOS as first class. Do people actually develop on a Mac in 2026? Why not just start with Linux?

foreigner• 6 months ago

Can't build iOS apps on anything else sadly.

_23sd2• 6 months ago

I mean if they were targeting "software engineers" in general then Windows would be the obvious choice in 2026 as much as in 2006. But these early releases are all about the SF bubble where Mac is very much dominant.

lvl1552• 6 months ago

Really? I frankly don’t know anyone who’s not on Linux. If you do any AI/ML you basically find yourself on a Linux box eventually. Perhaps I live in a bubble.

gbriel• 6 months ago

Majority of devs > 60% in the valley use MacOS for development. Apple hardware is best in class. It's unix like. Cost isn't an issue. Macbooks look cool. Many reasons.

poolnoodle• 6 months ago

These paid offerings geared toward software development must be a hell of a lot "smarter" than the regular chatbots. The amount of nonsense and bad or outright wrong code Gemini and ChatGPT throw at me lately is off the charts. I feel like they are getting dumber.

zitterbewegung• 6 months ago

I don’t understand why we are getting these software products that want to have vendor lock in when the underlying system isn’t being improved. I prefer Claude code right now because it’s a better product . Gemini just has a weird context window that poisons the rest of the code generated (when online) ChatGPT Codex vs Claude I feel that Claude is a better product and I don’t use enough tokens to for Claude Pro at $100 and just have a regular ChatGPT subscription for productivity tasks .

nkohari3• 6 months ago

I don’t understand why we are getting these software products that want to have vendor lock in when the underlying system isn’t being improved.

I think it's clear now that the pace of model improvements is asymptotic (or at least it's reached a local maxima) and the model itself provides no moat. (Every few weeks last year, the perception of "the best model" changed, based on basically nothing other than random vibes and hearsay.)

As a result, the labs are starting to focus on vertical integration (that is, building up the product stack) to deepen their moat.

mceachen• 6 months ago

It’s the inconsistency that gets me. Very similar tasks, similar complexity, same code base, same prompting:

Session A knocks it out of the park. Chef’s kiss.

Session B just does some random vandalism.

ghosty1412• 6 months ago

Yes they are, the fact that the agents have full access to your local project files makes a gigantic difference.

They do *very* well at things like: "Explain what this class does" or "Find the biggest pain points of the project architecture".

No comparison to regular ChatGPT when it comes to software development. I suggest trying it out, and not by saying "implement game" but rather try it by giving it clear scoped tasks where the AI doesn't have to think or abstract/generalize. So as some kind of code-monkey.

luke_walsh• 6 months ago

I'm excited to try this out, it seems like it would solve a lot of my workflow issues. I hope there is the ability to review/edit research docs and plans it generates and not just code.

jauntywundrkind• 6 months ago

Does the Codex app host MCP Apps?

_rwo• 6 months ago

seems like I need to update my toolset for the 3rd time this week

submeta• 6 months ago

Work with multiple agents in parallel

But you can already do that, in the terminal. Open your favourite terminal, use splits or tmux and spin up as many claude code or codex instances as you want. In parallel. I do it constantly. For all kinds of tasks, not only coding.

esafak3• 6 months ago

But they don't communicate. These do.

macmac_mac• 6 months ago

i've been using ai vibe coding tools since Copilot was basically spicy autocomplete, and this feels like the next obvious step: less “help me type” and more “please do this while I watch nervously.” The agent model sounds powerful, but in practice it’s still a lot of supervision, retries, and quiet hope it doesn’t hallucinate itself into a refactor I didn’t ask for.

prmph• 6 months ago

So if the agent struggles even when you are working with it, how will it be better working alone? This is why I never let the agent work by themselves. I'm very opinionated about my code.

Does it somehow gain some superpower from being left alone?

samstokes• 6 months ago

Bit of a buried lede:

For a limited time we're including Codex with ChatGPT Free

Is this the first free frontier coding agent? (I know there have been OSS coding agents for years, but not Codex/Claude Code.)

_ea1k• 6 months ago

That depends on whether Gemini CLI counts. I've had generally bad experiences with it, but it is free for at least some usage.

falloutx4• 6 months ago

Google also has aistudio.google.com which is Lovable competitor and its free for unlimited use. That seems to work so much better than gemini CLI even on similar tasks

blueaquilae• 6 months ago

This is an ode to opencode and how openai, very strangely, is just porting layout and feature of real open-source.

So much valuation, so much intern competetion and shenanigans than the creatives left.

rubslopes• 6 months ago

To me, the obvious next step for these companies is to integrate their products with web hosting. At this point, the remaining hurdle for non-developers is deploying their creations to the cloud with built-in monetization.

jimmy76615• 6 months ago

Just tell it to use your gcp/aws account using the cli, makes it infinitely powerful in terms of deployment. (Also, while I might miss some parts of programming that I have given to AI, I certainly don't miss working with clouds).

wiether• 6 months ago

Just tell it to use your gcp/aws account using the cli

Please don't.

People burning through their tokens allowance on Claude Code is one thing.

People having their agent unknowingly provisioning thousands of $ of cloud resources is something completely different.

trunnell• 6 months ago

How about, "tell the agent to write instructions for cloud deployment with a cost estimate"

johnpaulkiser• 6 months ago

interestingly opencode's first product was an IaC platform... seems to be where this is all going.

falloutx4• 6 months ago

I dont think these are made for non-devs, Lovable and other which are built for non-devs already provide hosting.

iamnotarobottho• 6 months ago

and specifically, the big companies, in a way that people notice. Claude Artifacts, AI Studio, etc. all kinda suck. If you have used Manus or connected your own CF, GCP, AWS, etc. you see how easy it could be if one of the big guys wanted it to be (or could get out of their own way).

the big boys probably don't want people who don't know sec deploying on their infra lol.

halflings2• 6 months ago

Deploying from Antigravity is as easy as say connecting the Firebase MCP [1] and asking it "deploy my app to firebase".

[1] https://firebase.google.com/docs/ai-assistance/mcp-server

anthonypasq• 6 months ago

Replit already does this

fabianlindfors• 6 months ago

We have been working on this, letting any coding agent define infrastructure so we can define it effortlessly: https://specific.dev. We aren't just targeting non-developers though, we think this is useful to anyone building primarily through coding agents.

Bishonen883• 6 months ago

I think deploying can already be done with the help of LLMs using docker and vpc's (e.g. hetzner and co.) rather easily.

What I struggle with is the legal overhead of e.g. collecting money for an app/website. I have a semi-finished app which I know I could delploy within a few hours but to collect money, living in Germany is a minefield from what I understand. I don't want my name made public with the app. GmbH (LLCs) cost thousands (?). The whole GDPR minefield, google-font usage scam etc. makes me hold back.

Googling/reddit only gives so much insights.

If someone has a good reference about starting a SaaS/App from within EU/Germany with all the legalities etc. I'd be super interested!

desireco422• 6 months ago

It keeps offering me to "Get Plus" even though I am signed and already have a Plus plan.

Codex really grown on me lately. I re-signed to try it out on a project I have and it turned out to be really great addition to my toolkit.

It isn't always perfect and it's cli (how I mostly use it) isn't as sophisticated as OpenCode which is my default.

I am happy with this app, I am using Superset, terminal app which suprisingly is well positioned to help you if you work in cli like I do. But like I said, new desktop app seems like a solid addition.

shevy-java• 6 months ago

No.

I am glad to not depend on AI. It would annoy me to no ends how it tries to assimilate everything. It's like systemd on roids in this aspect. It will swallow up more and more tasks. Granted, in a way this is saying "then it was not necessary to have this things anymore now that AI solves it all", but I am skeptical of "the praised land" here. Skynet was not trusted back in 1982 or so. I don't trust AI either.

dsiegel2275• 6 months ago

Good luck.

FeteCommuniste• 6 months ago

I'm the same way but I've got the gloomy sense that folks like us are about to be swept aside by the flood if we don't "adapt."

I got invites to seven AI-centered meetings late last week.

deepfriedbits2• 6 months ago

Same. And indeed, it's here. The genie is not going back into the bottle, so we have to learn how to live in this new world.

Eric Schmidt has spoken a lot recently about how it's one of the biggest advances in human history and it's hard to disagree with him, even if some aspects make me anxious.

rendleflag• 6 months ago

I feel the same way about using the Internet or books to code. I'd rather just have the source code so that I'm not dependent on anything other then my own brain.

marstall• 6 months ago

i wonder if the skills will divide a bit. That there will be those who still program by hand - and this will be a needed skill, though AI will be a part of their daily toolset to a greater or lesser degree.

Then there will be the AI wranglers who act almost like DevOps engineers for the AI - producing software in a different way ...

ghosty1412• 6 months ago

I think a lot of AI talk doesn't explain where it shines the brightest (imo): Write the code you don't want to write.

I've recently had an issue "add VNC authentication" which covers adding vnc password auth to our inhouse vnc server at work.

This is not hard, but just a bit of tedious work getting the plumbing done, adding some UI for the settings, fiddle with some bits according to the spec.

But it's (at least to me) not very enjoyable, there is nothing to learn, nothing new to discover, no much creativity necessary etc. and this is where Codex comes in. As long as you give it clearly scoped tasks in an environment where it can use existing structures and convetions, it will deliver. In this case it implemented 85% of the feature perfectly and I only had to tweak minor things like refactor 1-2 functions. Obviously I read and understood and checked everything it wrote, that is an absolute must for serious work.

So my point is, use AI as the "code monkey". I believe most developers enjoy the creative aspects of the job, but not the "type C++ on your keyboard". AI can help with the latter, it will type what you tell it and you can focuse on the architecture and creative part of the whole thing.

You don't have to trust AI in that sense, use it like autocompletion, you can program perfectly fine without it but it makes your fingers hurt more.

causal• 6 months ago

This is the 5th OpenAI product called Codex if I'm counting correctly

epolanski2• 6 months ago

OT: I never liked about codex how it didn't ask for confirmations before editing. While Claude has auto accept off by default I never understood why codex didn't have it. I want to iterate on LLMs edit suggestions.

Did they fix it?

Otherwise I'm not interested.

PeterStuer• 6 months ago

At least codex inside pycharm has auto edit off by default.

wpm• 6 months ago

Maybe I'm just not getting it, but I just don't give a flying fuck about any of this crap.

Like, seriously, this is the grand new vision of using a computer, this is the interface to these LLMs we're settling on? This is the best we could come up with? Having an army of chatbots chatting to each other running basic build commands in a terminal while we what? Supervise them? Yell at them? When am I getting manager pay bumps then?

Sorry. I'll stick with occasionally chatting with one of these things in a sandboxed web browser on a single difficult problem I'm having. I just don't see literally any value in using them this way. More power to the rest of you.

wendgeabos• 6 months ago

OK.

karmasimida2• 6 months ago

Not to rain on the parade, but this app feels to me ... unpolished. Some of the options in the demo feels less thought out and just put together.

I will try it out, but is this just me, or product/UX side of recent OpenAI products are sort of ... skipped over? It is good that agents help ship software quickly, but please no half-baked stuff like Altas 2.0 again ...

isodev• 6 months ago

I don’t get why they announce it as a “Mac app” when the UI looks and feels nothing like a Mac app. Also electron… again.

Why not flex some of those codex skills for a proper native app…

tartoran• 6 months ago

What else do you expect from vibecoding? Even the announcement for this app is LLM generated.

karmasimida2• 6 months ago

This is true. The font and animation feels basic to me, even as a programmer focused app

gordon_freeman• 6 months ago

How does Codex mac app compare with Cursor? If anyone who tried both can explain here?

My experience with Cursor is generally good and I like that it gives me UX of using VS Code and also allows selection of multiple models to choose if one model is stuck on the prompt and does not work.

throwaway314155• 6 months ago

Coding agents with full automation like this require a different workflow that is almost purely conversational compared to Cursor/Windsurf/VS Code. It requires more trust in the model (but you can always keep Cursor open off to the side and verify its edits). But, once you get into the right rhythm with it, it can be _really_ powerful.

nebben64• 6 months ago

You can't write code in the Codex App, it's not an editor. You just manage agents (and ask them to write/implement whatever)

teaearlgraycold• 6 months ago

Kind of embarrassing to demo "Please change this string to gpt-5.2". Presumably the diff UI doesn't let you edit the text manually? Or are they demonstrating being so AI-brained you refuse to type anything yourself?

christkv• 6 months ago

What are the max context sizes ?

beklein• 6 months ago

This will actually work well with my current workflow: dictation for prompts, parallel execution, and working on multiple bigger and smaller projects so waiting times while Codex is coding are fully utilized, plus easy commits with auto commit messages. Wow, thank you for this. Since skills are now first class tools, I will give it a try and see what I can accomplish with them.

I know/hope some OpenAI people are lurking in the comments and perhaps they will implement this, or at least consider it, but I would love to be able to use @ to add files via voice input as if I had typed it. So when I say "change the thingy at route slash to slash somewhere slash page dot tsx", I will get the same prompt as if I had typed it on my keyboard, including the file pill UI element shown in the input box. Same for slash commands. Voice is a great input modality, please make it a first class input. You are 90% there, this way I don't need my dictation app (Handy, highly recommended) anymore.

Also, I see myself using the built in console often to ls, cat, and rg to still follow old patterns, and I would love to pin the console to a specific side of the screen instead of having it at the bottom and pls support terminal tabs or I need to learn tmux.

shostack2• 6 months ago

So much this. I'm eagerly waiting to see what anthropic and OpenAI do to make dictation-first interaction a first class citizen instead of requiring me to use a separate app like Super Whisper. It would dramatically improve complex, flow-breaking interactions when adding files, referencing users or commands, etc.

Importantly I want full voice control over the app and interactions not just dictating prompts.

avazhi• 6 months ago

ChatGPT can’t even write me a simple working AutoHotKey script so I’m not sure why I’d trust it with any actual coding. As I’ve done for about the past year with OpenAI showcases like this, this elicited an ‘Oh, that’s kinda neat, I’ll just wait for Gemini to do something similar so it will actually work’ from me.

OlympicMarmoto4• 6 months ago

It is baffling how these AI companies, with billions of dollars, cannot build native applications, even with the help of AI. From a UI perspective, these are mostly just chat apps, which are not particularly difficult to code from scratch. Before the usual excuses come about how it is impossible to build a custom UI, consider software that is orders of magnitude more complex, such as raddbg, 10x, Superluminal, Blender, Godot, Unity, and UE5, or any video game with a UI. On top of that, programs like Claude Cowork or Codex should, by design, integrate as deeply with the OS as possible. This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron.

bopbopbop75• 6 months ago

even with the help of AI.

This is what you get when you build with AI, an electron app with an input field.

airstrike4• 6 months ago

I've done way, way more than that, as I'm sure others have too.

This is just bad product management.

hdjrudni5• 6 months ago

Doesn't have to be. I just revived one of my C++ GLFW app from 2009. Codex was able to help me get it running again and added some nice new features.

I guess you get an Electron app if you don't prompt it otherwise. Probably because it's learned from what all the humans are putting out there these days.

That said.. unless you know better, it's going to keep happening. Even moreso when folks aren't learning the fundamentals anymore.

babypuncher• 6 months ago

At the end of the day LLMs just reproduce the consensus of the internet, so it makes sense that a coding agent would spit out software that looks like most of what's on the internet.

LLM output is called slop for a reason.

OlympicMarmoto4• 6 months ago

Claude code is perfectly capable of writing low level rendering and input code and it can be equally as mindless as vibe coding web apps.

E.g. just say "write a c++ gui widget library using dx11 and win32 and copy flutters layout philosophy, use harfbuzz for shaping, etc etc"

rafram3• 6 months ago

- Video games often use HTML/JS-based UI these days.

- UE5 has its own custom UI framework, which definitely does not feel "native" on any platform. Not really any better than Electron.

- You can easily call native APIs from Electron.

I agree that Electron apps that feel "web-y" or hog resources unnecessarily are distasteful, but most people don't know or care whether the apps they're running use native UI frameworks, and being able to reassign web developers to work on desktop apps is a significant selling point that will keep companies coming back to Electron instead of native.

anonymous9082133• 6 months ago

Given that OpenAI managed to single-handedly triple the price of RAM globally, people will very much care about their chat application consuming what little scraps are left over for them, even if they don't know enough about anything to know why their system is running poorly.

harikb3• 6 months ago

I have been building Desktop apps with Go + Wails[1]. I happen to know Go, but if you are ai-coding even that is not necessary.

A full fledged app, that does everything I want, is ~ 10MB. I know Tauri+Rust can get it to probably 1 MB. But it is a far cry from these Electron based apps shipping 140MB+ . My app at 10MB does a lot more, has tons of screens.

Yes, it can be vibe coded and it is especially not an excuse these days.

[1] https://wails.io/

Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Slack, Spotify? Cursor? VsCode? I have like 10 copies of Chrome in my machine!

pama2• 6 months ago

My main take is exactly the opposite. Why not build everything with a simple text interface (shell command) so the models learn to use these tools natively in pretraining. Even TUI like codex-cli or claude code are needless abstractions for such use cases and make full automation hard. You could add as many observability or input layers for humans as you want but the core should be simple calls that are saved in historical and documentation logs. [the headless/noninteractive modes come close, as do the session logs]

ryandrake2• 6 months ago

It would be cool if I didn't have to worry about whether I was "in" or "out" of the AI TUI. Right now, I need at least two terminals open: One running my shell, that I use to issue shell commands, and one running Claude, where I can't. It would be nice if it could just be my shell, and when I wanted to invoke claude, I'd just type:

   c Do this programming task for me.

Right in the shell.

vardalab2• 6 months ago

I agree. I like using Claude or Codex in VM on top of the tmux. Much more flexibility that way. I open a new tmux window for each issue/task big enough to warrant it, issue a prompt to create a worktree and agents and let them go to town. I actually use claude and codex a the same time. I still get observability because of tmux and I can close my laptop and let them cook for a while in yolo mode since the VM is frequently backed up in proxmox pbs. I am a retired hobbyist but this has been a nice force multiplier without devolving a complete viby mess. I hope these new orchestration tool support this like vs code remote development does. Same for cloud. I want them to support my personal "cloud" instead of laggy github mess.

markbao• 6 months ago

TUI is easy to train on, but hard to use for users. Part of the reason it’s easier to have LLMs use a bunch of Unix tools for us is that their text interface is tedious and hard to remember. If you’re a top 5% expert in those tools it doesn’t matter as much I guess but most people aren’t.

Even a full-featured TUI like Claude Code is highly limited compared to a visual UI. Conversation branching, selectively applying edits, flipping between files, all are things visual UI does fine that are extremely tedious in TUI.

Overall it comes down to the fact that people have to use TUI and that’s more important than it being easy to train, and there’s a reason we use websites and not terminals for rich applications these days.

namelosw2• 6 months ago

The situation for Desktop development is nasty. Microsoft had so many halfassed frameworks and nobody knows which one to use. It’s probably the de facto platform on Windows IS Electron, and Microsoft use them often, too.

On MacOS is much better. But most of the team either ended up with locked in Mac-only or go cross platform with Electron.

harikb3• 6 months ago

As I outlined in a sibling comment. You can still use React and your JS developers. Just don't ship a whole browser with your app.

May be an app that is as complex as Outlook needs the pixel-perfect tweaking of every little button that they need to ship their own browser for exact version match. But everything else can use *system native browser*. Use Tauri or Wails or many other solutions like these

That said, I do agree on the other comments about TUIs etc. Yes, nobody cares about the right abstractions, not even the companies that literally depend on automating these applications

OlympicMarmoto4• 6 months ago

This is another common excuse.

You don't need to use microsoft's or apple's or google's shit UI frameworks. E.g. see https://filepilot.tech/

You can just write all the rendering yourself using metal/gl/dx. if you didn't want to write the rendering yourself there are plenty of libraries like skia, flutter's renderer, nanovg, etc

weaksauce• 6 months ago

microsoft also uses react native for the start menu and also bricked that during a recent upgrade apparently... along with breaking other stuff.

dheera• 6 months ago

This. Even Linux is nasty. Qt and GTK are both horrible messes to use.

It would be nice if someone made a way to write desktop apps in JavaScript with a consistent, cross-platform modern UI (i.e. swipe to refresh, tabs, beautiful toggle switches, not microscopic check boxes) but without resorting to rendering everything inside a bloated WebKit browser.

zem• 6 months ago

"native" is used for different things, from "use the platform's default gui toolkit" to "compile to a machine code binary". the former is a bit of a mess, but the latter is strictly better than wrapping a web view and shipping an entire chrome fork to display and interpret it. just write something in qt and forget about native look and feel, and the performance gain will be enough to greatly improve the user experience.

walt_grata• 6 months ago

Do not give a shit about how they excuse doing a bad job. If their tools make them that much more productive, and being the developer of those tools should allow you to make great use of them.

Use native for osx Use .Net framework for windows Use whatever on Linux.

Its just being lazy and ineffective. I also do not care about whatever "business" justification anyone can come up with for half assing it.

r0fl• 6 months ago

These companies have BILLIONS of dollars and some of the smartest people in the world and access to bleeding edge AI

There should be no excuses! Figure it out!

deterministic• 6 months ago

Win32 is the platform to use on Microsoft Windows. Everything else is built on top of it. So it will (a) work (b) be there forever.

tombert• 6 months ago

I guess it shows how geriatric I am with desktop app development these days, but does no one use Qt anymore? Wasn't the dream for that to be a portable and native platform to write GUI apps? Presumably that could abstract away which bullshit Microsoft framework they came out with this week.

I haven't touched desktop application programming in a very long time and I have no desire to ever do so again after trying to learn raw GTK a million years ago, so I'm admittedly kind of speaking out of my ass here.

wizzledonker3• 6 months ago

Qt with QML works fine. The real reason is that companies can't hire enough native developers because the skill is comparitively rare.

wilg• 6 months ago

Unpopular opinion: why would you want a "native app"? On macOS, basically every app Apple makes themselves is worse in terms of design, usability, and performance than a popular Electron-based alternative.

For example, I tried opening a 200MB log file in Apple's Console.app and it hung. Opened right up in VS Code.

marxisttemp4• 6 months ago

What is the superior Electron based alternative to Pixelmator Pro? Final Cut? Logic? Pages?

uxhacker• 6 months ago

Why would widgets and buttons be better than a console, and or voice?

scotty792• 6 months ago

Because you see stuff before you decide what to invoke?

rainprincess2• 6 months ago

because not everything can be describe in code, language, or speech. if you're iterating on anything that requires refinement in terms of perception, you may need real time feedback.

noonething• 6 months ago

What if they kept the 'good stuff' from us? Does that seem likely here?

AstroBen2• 6 months ago

What features are they missing that a native app would allow for?

No-one outside of a small sliver of the tech community cares if an app is built with web tech

Electron also opens up easier porting to Linux which almost certainly wouldn't happen if companies insist on native only

FridgeSeal2• 6 months ago

Users care about performance and jank, it’s just that they’ve been successfully forced to shut-up-and-deal-with-it. They’re not involved in purchasing or feedback, and the people that are don’t use it enough to care, or just don’t care. Users who complain about it may as well shout into the void for how much companies take note, but hey, at least we got an ai button now!

Atlassian products are a great example of this. Everyone knows Atlassian has garbage performance. Everyone complains about it. Never gets fixed though. Everyone I know could write customer complaints about its performance in every feedback box for a year, and the only thing that would happen is that we’d have wasted our own time.

Users _care_ about this stuff. They just aren’t empowered to feedback about it, or are trained to just sigh and put up with it.

coldtea4• 6 months ago

Desktop GUI is a lost art. Gen X were the last people to master it.

keyle2• 6 months ago

I am a gen X, this hurts, but it might be true :(

autoconfig• 6 months ago

This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron.

That is not correct. One of the major selling points of Electron is precisely that you can call native APIs.

herval2• 6 months ago

It’s just irrelevant for most users. These companies are getting more adoption than they can handle, no matter how clunky their desktop apps are. They’re optimizing for experimentation. Not performance.

IhateAI6• 6 months ago

More adoption? I don't think so... It feels to me that these models && tools are getting more verbose/consuming more tokens to compensate for a decrease in usage. I know my usage of these tools has fallen off a cliff as it become glaringly obvious they're useful in very limited scopes.

I think most people start off overusing these tools, then they find the few small things that genuinely improve their workflows which tend to be isolated and small tasks.

Moltbot et al, to me, seems like a psyop by these companies to get token consumption back to levels that justify the investments they need. The clock is ticking, they need more money.

I'd put my money on token prices doubling to tripling over the next 12-24 months.

preston-kwei2• 6 months ago

While this may be true for casual users, for dev native products like Codex, the desktop experience actually matters a lot. When you are living in the tool for hours, latency, keyboard handling, file system access, and OS-level integration stop being “nice to have” and start affecting real productivity. web or Electron apps are fine for experimentation, but they hit a ceiling fast for serious workflows -- especially if the icp is mostly technical users

csomar• 6 months ago

It's not irrelevant for developers neither for users. Tiktok has shown that users deeply care about the experience and they'll flock en-masse to something that has a good experience.

forrestthewoods• 6 months ago

This is what happens when an entire generation of programmers doesn’t know how to write code in any language other than JavaScript or maybe Python.

How far from grace we have fallen :sob:

rainprincess2• 6 months ago

I feel like it's because of the way they are internally structured. They have some people who are machine learning trained on post-training, and other people who have nice product management resumes. The post-training people want more compute, well-formatted data, honestly more ways to try whatever technique of reinforcement learning they want.

The product people are building things, but OpenAI has literally been throwing stuff at the wall and it hasn't been sticking. They seem to be behind in terms of everything user interface. Canvas came after Anthropic had artifacts. Codex came after Anthropic had Claude Code.

Some of their researchers (okay one) have (has) stated they believe in interface work. That's because GUIs help engage the person beyond thought, and help the person work with more complexity (perception, physics, form, 3D). But they're playing catchup, or they're trying to incubate wins in science / math.

gloosx• 6 months ago

This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron.

Who told you that? You can write entire C libraries and call them from Electron just fine. Browser is a native application after all. All this "native applications" debate boils down to the UI implementation strategy. Maintaining three separate UI stacks (WinUI, SwiftUI, GTK/Qt) is dramatically more expensive and slower to iterate on than a single web-based UI with shared logic

We already have three major OSes, all doing things differently. The browsers, on the other hand, use the same language, same rendering model, same layout system, and same accessibility layer everywhere, which is a massive abstraction win.

You don't casually give up massive abstraction wins just to say "it's native". If "just build it natively" were actually easier, faster, or cheaper at scale, everyone would do just that.

gbalduzzi• 6 months ago

It baffles me how much the discourse over native apps rarely takes this into consideration.

You reduce development effort by a third, it is ok to debate whether a company so big should invest into a better product anyway but it is pretty clear why they are doing this

AdamN2• 6 months ago

The gap here is that the company has the money and native apps are so clearly better. With an interactive app a company like OpenAI could really tweak the experience for Android and iOS which have different UX philosophies and featuresets in order to give the best experience possible. It's really a no brainer imho.

theknarf• 6 months ago

React Native is able to build abstractions on top of both Android and iOS that uses native UI. Microsoft even have a package for doing a "React Native" for Windows: https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-windows

It's weird that we don't have a unified "React Native Desktop" that would build upon the react-native-windows package and add similar backends for MacOS and Linux. That way we could be building native apps while keeping the stuff developers like from React.

vintagedave2• 6 months ago

If "just build it natively" were actually easier, faster, or cheaper at scale, everyone would do just that

Value prop of product quality aside, isn't the AI claim that it helps you be more productive? I would expect that OpenAI would run multiple frontends and that they'd use Codex to do it.

Ie are they using their own AI (I would assume it's semi-vibe-coded) to just get out a new product or using AI to create a new product using the productivity gains to let them produce higher quality?

nineteen999• 6 months ago

This is such a toy webdev take. It's like you guys forget that the web-browser wouldn't work at all if not for the server half, all compiled to native code.

The browser is compiled to native code. It wasn't that long ago that we had three seperate web browsers who couldn't agree on the same set of standards either.

Try porting your browser to Java or C# and see how much faster it is then. The OS the browser and the server run on are compiled to native code. Sun gave up on HotJava web browser in the 1990's, because it couldn't do %10 or %20 of what Netscape or IE could do, and was 10 x slower.

Not everybody is running a website selling internet widgets. Some of us actually have more on the line if our systems fail or are not performant than "oooh our shareholders are gonna be pissed".

People running critical emergency response systems day in, day out.

The very system you typed this bullshit on is running native code. But oh no, thats "too hard" for the webdev crowd. Everyone should bend to accomodate them. The OS should be ported to run inside the browser, because the browser is "so good".

Good one. It's hilarious to see this Silicon Valley/Bay Area, chia-seed eating bullshit in cheap spandex riding their bikes while the trucks shipping shit from coast to coast passing them by.

outime• 6 months ago

If "just build it natively" were actually easier, faster, or cheaper at scale, everyone would do just that.

Exactly. Years go by and HN keeps crying about this despite it being extremely easy to understand for anyone. For such a smart community, it's baffling how some debates are so dumb.

The only metric really worth reviewing is resource usage (and perhaps appearance). These factors aren't relevant to the general population as otherwise, most people wouldn't use these apps (which clearly isn't the case).

knoopx• 6 months ago

the three OSes is BS, none of them cares about linux

GorbachevyChase• 6 months ago

Wouldn’t maintaining the different UI stacks be something a language model could handle? Creating a new front end where the core logic is already defined or making a new one from an existing example has gone pretty fast for me. The “maintenance“ cost might not be as high as you think.

novok• 6 months ago

Devex tooling is so much better in web, you can ship much faster, and speed to market matters more than making a native app. Apple dev tooling and build speed sucks a ton in comparison, and don't get started with windows

AltF4me• 6 months ago

This is the reason. When an app changes so often, across different platforms, you don't want to support people lagging behind on old versions.

I'm not saying native is better or worse, but this will be why.

iamsaitam• 6 months ago

Why should they? It's not like these apps will be around for long

coro_1• 6 months ago

The brief video OpenAI did sets the stage as I see it - for an evolving kind of engineer. Who will think and design as much as know code.

72deluxe4• 6 months ago

I used wxWidgets to build a native GUI for Windows + Mac 10+ years ago and implemented all GUI-drawing (it was an audio signal processor control software so included meters, faders, knobs, audio spectrum and I even incorporated Horde3D OpenGL interface for visualising an arena [sadly never fully finished to full potential as my modelling abilities in Blender simply wasn't good enough]). I wrote that, and another guy wrote the network library in C that sent signals to the network devices, and received them. I responded to the incoming network info to draw appropriate parts of the UI like meters/scopes at 50ms minimum.

The fact that we did this as a 1-man team for the GUI and that I can still compile it today (if I had the code) against wxWidgets, to then run on macOS and Windows simply shows the lazy nature of (most/all?) desktop apps by big companies these days.

I utterly detest using them, but it seems customers think an app that takes 5 seconds to launch with a spinning whirly wheel and horizontal gradient animation over list views for 5+ seconds before content is loaded is perfectly acceptable. Quality with a capital K!

suyash• 6 months ago

Stating Unity, Unreal Engine and Blender as good examples of UI is a joke in itself, can't take comment seriously after that.

fHr• 6 months ago

CLI > all Don't be a application peasant

pplonski86• 6 months ago

It is not that easy to build such app from scratch ... it all requires a lot of work, even with AI help. I think the most important is to provide easy to use UI first, and if speed or some missing features will be blockers for further innovation step then maybe native app will be at some point created.

zaptheimpaler• 6 months ago

Is there any actual problem you have with the application? If not, who cares? Is this the 10 year old Electron is slow and bad meme being trotted out again?

sheepscreek• 6 months ago

It’s less that and more - we’re still figuring out the best interface to use them.

For coding, interacting with the agent is best done via chat, especially if you’re trying to run teams of agents, then you’re not going to be looking at code all the time. The agent will summarize the changes, you will click on the diffs, approve them and move on. So it’s a very different experience from being the only one coding.

Edit:

Here’s a hot take -

A quick note on SwiftUI, it’s a piece of garbage that’s so hard to use that native devs despise it. So far no AI has been able to one shot it for me.

Blender most likely uses immediate mode - which is more resource intensive and less efficient than a stateful object oriented interface. But Zed uses a similar approach with (I think) success.

Then think about this, pre-AI, Google with all its billions, used web interfaces in all its desktop product GUIs :)

Apple, with all of its billions, created XCode which is inferior to every other IDE I have ever used. They still haven’t learned from Visual Studio. Microsoft is bad at a lot of things but developer tooling isn’t one of them.

All that to say, even if you knew what you wanted, taking that vision to reality is a difficult challenge. At least with AI, they could create a 100 different prototypes cheaply and pick the best direction based on that. That they should do, and they probably aren’t.

auggierose• 6 months ago

Despite being an Electron app, it doesn't work on Intel macs...

miscend4• 6 months ago

You can try this script, it should work https://github.com/Miscend/codex-rebuilder

adam_patarino• 6 months ago

AI has more training on web apps I think the real answer is that these guys are told they need to ship in 2 months and have a huge team of web devs

827a2• 6 months ago

It's baffling to me that people still throw around the word "native" like it means anything. Go use VSCode or Obsidian, then go use Apple Music. Electron can be so much better than anything native. The problem isn't that macos ChatGPT, Codex, or Claude isn't native. Their apps just really suck. They're poorly engineered and bad.

barumrho• 6 months ago

Apple Music isn't native either.

capl• 6 months ago

LLMs are trained on web slop, not engineering

k__• 6 months ago

Anthropic bought Bun and it's creator relentlessly optimizes Claude Code now.

So, there seems to be light.

LucasBrandt• 6 months ago

It's amazing to me that in the official Gemini app on Android, the hamburger menu on the left does not open on swipe - only if you click the hamburger button. A basic native UI interaction in the home screen of one of Google's flagship apps.

waldopat2• 6 months ago

Just jumping on the thread. I think the conversation is conflating two very different things:

1. Turing test UX's, where a chat app is the product and the feature (Electron is fine) 2. The class of things LLMs are good at that often do not need a UI, let alone a chat app, and need automation glue (Electron may cause friction)

Personally, I feel like we're jumping on capabilities and missing a much larger issue of permissioning and security.

In an API or MCP context, permissions may be scoped via tokens at the very least, but within an OS context, that boundary is not necessarily present. Once an agent can read and write files or executed commands as the logged in user, there's a level of trust and access that goes against most best practices.

This is probably a startup to be hatched, but it seems to me this space of getting agents to be scoped properly and stay in bounds, just like cursor has rules, would be a prereq before giving access to an OS at all.

firemelt2• 6 months ago

use to have thoughts like that until I realize, electron help the cross platform and its really polished

hmokiguess2• 6 months ago

I'm still waiting for the big pivotal moment in this space, I think there is a lot of potential with rethinking an IDE to be Agent first, and lots of what is out there is still lacking. (It's like we all don't know what we don't know, so we are just recycling UX around trying to solve it)

I keep coming back to my basic terminal with tmux running multiple sessions. I recently though forked this https://github.com/tiann/hapi and been loving using tailscale to expose my setup on my mobile device for convenience (plus the voice input there)

airstrike4• 6 months ago

yeah, TUIs for AI is just lazy work imho. I'm glad at least this time it's a macOS app, but it's still just a shitty chat interface

also this feels like a unique opportunity to take some of that astronomical funding and point it towards building the right tooling for building a performant cross-platform UI toolkit in a memory-safe language—not to mention a great way for these companies to earn some goodwill from the FOSS community

quantumHazer• 6 months ago

Or maybe, hear me out, we don't need any of this ""agent"" first shiny thingy

hollowturtle3• 6 months ago

There is little to no integration between deterministic IDE features(like refactorings) and LLMs. For example I don't want a statistical tool to rename a method by predicting tokens, I want it to use IDE features and not via another higher abstraction protocol like mpc, I want deeper integration. Sometimes I look at comments in code and think "why can't I have an agent checking if the content of a comment actually reflect the code below?" I feel like we're light years away from a killer integration

hdjrudni5• 6 months ago

This might actually be another area language servers shine. As I understand it, the TS Language Server can do renames. Ergo, we ought to be able to have the LLM ask the lang server to do the rename instead of trying to do it itself. That'd be easier than trying to integrate with each IDE individually. (Whereby "IDE" seems to be synonymous with "VSCode" lately...)

jillesvangurp• 6 months ago

Deep integrations are hard and the AI companies are just winging it when it comes to eating their own dog food. Their apps are bare bones, somewhat flaky, and overall not that impressive from a UX point of view.

It's very obvious that while their AI teams are top notch, their product teams are very middle of the road. Including design. Even though they apparently engaged Jony Ive, I can't actually see his 'touch' on anything they have. You'd expect them to have a much higher level of ambition when it comes to their own products. But they seem stuck getting even the basics shipping. I use Chat GPT for Desktop. It's alright but it seems to have stagnated a bit and it has some annoying bugs and flakiness. Random shit seems to break regularly with releases as well.

Another good example of the lack of vision/product management is the #1 and oldest use case for LLMs since day 1: generating text. You'd expect somebody to maybe have come up with the genius idea of "eh, hmm, you know, I wonder if we can do better than pasting blobs of markdown rendered HTML to and/from a word processor from a f**ing sidebar".

Where's the ultimate agentic word processor? The ultimate writing experience? It's not there. Chat GPT is hopelessly clumsy doing even the most basic things in word processors. It can't restructure your document. It can't insert/delete bits of text. It can't use any of the formatting and styling controls. It can't do that in the UI. It can't do that at the file level. It's just not very good at doing anything more than generating bits of text with very basic markdown styling that you might copy paste to your word processor. It won't match the styling you have. Last time I checked Gemini in Google docs it was equally useless. I don't have MS Office but I haven't heard anything that suggests it is better.

For whatever reason, this has not been a priority (bad product management?) or they simply don't have the creativity to see the rather obvious integration issues in front of them.

Yes making those is a lot of work and requires a bit of planning. But wasn't the point of agentic coding that that's now easy? Apparently not.

hamasho• 6 months ago

More simple and similar app: vibe-kanban

https://www.vibekanban.com/

archiepeach3• 6 months ago

Interesting timing for me personally as I just switched from running Codex in multiple tabs in Cursor to Ghostty. It had nicer fonts by default, better tab switching that was consistent with the keyboard shortcut to switch to any tab on Mac, and it had native notifications that would ping when Codex had finished. Worktrees requiring manual configuration was probably the one sticking point, so definitely looking forward to this.

archiepeach3• 6 months ago

We are certainly approaching the point where a high end MacBook Pro for development isn’t required. Feels very close to just being able to use an iPad? My current workplace deploy on Vercel, we already test actively on feature branches and the models have gotten so good that you can reliably just commit what they’ve done (with linting and type check hooks etc) and in the rare event something is broken, follow up with a new commit.

archiepeach3• 6 months ago

* Replace MacBook with any high-end machine that requires a bunch of configuration for local dev. And replace iPad with any thin client that’s much more portable and convenient, eg glasses that display a screen and Bluetooth keyboard. Why shouldn’t I be able to describe the changes I want to an LLM from a coffee shop?

shostack2• 6 months ago

I did a whole feature in a game I'm building while riding in a car to dinner in Claude this weekend. It could do everything itself except the PR (kicked me over to the GitHub app for that).

I do wonder how that impacted my usage vs doing it locally, and I do with usage were more visible in the mobile app (at least give me my statusline). But it worked.

laacz• 6 months ago

Judging from the performance issues with Claude Code, you won't be able to run a decent agentic cli or desktop workflow orchestrator on anything other than mbp.

hollowturtle3• 6 months ago

I don't know you, but apart from ai tools race fatigue(feel pretty much like frameworks fatigue), all I see is mouse traveling a lot between far distant small elements, buttons and textareas. AI should have brought innovation even in UIs we basically stopped innovating there

waldopat2• 6 months ago

It seems the big feature is working agents in parallel? I've been working agents in parallel in Claude Code for almost 9 months now. Just create a command in .claude/commands that references an agent in .claude/agents. You can also just call parallel default Task agents to work concurrently.

Using slash commands and agents has been a game changer for me for anything from creating and executing on plans to following proper CI/CD policies when I commit changes.

To Codex more generally, I love it for surgical changes or whenever Claude chases its tail. It's also very, very good at finding Claude's blindspots on plans. Using AI tools adversarially is another big win in terms of getting things 90% right the first time. Once you get the right execution plan with the right code snippets, Claude is essentially a very fast typer. That's how I prefer to do AI-assisted development personally.

That said, I agree with the comments on tokens. I can use Codex until the sun goes down on $20/month. I use the $200/month pro plan with Claude and have only maxxed out a couple times, but I do find the volume to quality to be better with Claude. So far it's worth the money.

Dowwie• 6 months ago

Hey, that's great OpenAI. Now add about 6 zeroes to the end of the weekly token limit for your customers and maybe we could use the app

daxfohl• 6 months ago

It would be nice if it didn't have to be all local. I'd love a managed cluster feature where you could just blast some workloads off to some designated server or cluster and manage them remotely, share progress with teammates, etc. (Not "cloud" though; I'd still want them on the internal network). I imagine something like that is in the works.

andrewchambers• 6 months ago

I do it with ssh and tmux. I suppose tools could make it better.

indigodaddy5• 6 months ago

Not going to solve your exact problem but I started this project with this approach in mind. It is exposed to the Internet though on a VPS or server but using caddy basic auth in front of the coding url

https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin

keeeba• 6 months ago

Is everything OpenAI do/release now a response to something Anthropic have recently released?

I remember the days when it was worth reading about their latest research/release. Halcyon days indeed.

punnerud• 6 months ago

When can I get remote access in the iPhone app? Start on my laptop, check results using Tailscale/VPN and add follow up’s on the mobile to run on the computer. Know many that would love this feature.

kzahel3• 6 months ago

Right? Why not focus on a nice mobile handoff experience? Not being tethered to your desktop or laptop for work is such a game changer! This codex app is like exactly the workflow I use but the fact that I can't pick up where I left off on my phone is just braindead stupid!

gigatexal• 6 months ago

For pure code generation is ChatGPT 5.2 so much better than Claude opus 4.5 thinking to have me switch? I’m basically all in on Claude.

Sure I could move to open code and use them as commodities but I’ve gotten use to Claude code and like using the vendors first party app.

jtrn4• 6 months ago

People's mileage may vary, but in my instance, this was so bad that I actually got angry while trying to use it.

It's slow and stupid. It does not do proper research. It does not follow instructions. It randomly decides to stop being agentic, and instead just dumps the code for me to paste. It has the extremely annoying habit of just doing stuff without understanding what I meant, making a mess, then claiming everything is fine. The outdated training data is extremely annoying when working with Nuxt 4+. It is not creative at solving problems. It dosent show the thinking. The Undo code does not give proper feedback on the diff and if it actually did "undo." And I hate the personality. It HAS to be better than it comes off for me because I am actually in a bad mood after having worked with it. I would rather YOLO code with Gemini 3 flash, since it's actually smarter in my assessment, and at least I can iterate faster, and it feels like it has better common sense.

Just as an example, I found an old, terrible app I made years ago for our firm that handles room reservations. I told it to update from Bootstrap to Flowbite UI. Codex just took forever to make a mess, installed version 2.7 when 4.0.1 is the latest, even when I explicitly stated that it should use the absolute latest version. Then it tried to install it and failed, so it reverted to the outdated CDN.

I gave the same task to Claude Code. Same prompt. It one-shotted it quickly. Then I asked it to swap out ALL the fetch logic to have SPA-like functionality with the new beta 4 version of HTMX, and it one-shot that too in the time Codex spent just trying to read a few files in the project.

This reminds me of the feeling I had when I got the Nokia N800. It was so promising on paper, but the product was so bad and terrible to use that I knew Nokia was done for. If this was their take on what an acceptable smartphone could be, it proves that the whole foundation is doomed. If this is OpenAI's take on what an agentic coding assistant should be—something that can run by itself and iterate until it completes its task in an intelligent and creative way.... OpenAI is doomed.

adithyassekhar2• 6 months ago

I'm not taking OpenAI's side here but have you reviewed what claude did?

spiderfarmer• 6 months ago

I only use claude through the chat ui because it’s faster and it gives me more control. I read most of it and the code is almost always better than what I would do, simply because lazy ass me likes to take shortcuts way too often.

prodigycorp8• 6 months ago

If you're using 5.2 high, with all due respect, this has to be a skill issue. If you're using 5.2 Codex high — use 5.2 high. gpt-5.2 is slow, yes (ok, keeping it real, it's excruciatingly slow). But it's not the moronic caricature you're saying it is.

If you need it to be up to date with your version of a framework, then ask it to use the context7 mcp server. Expecting training data to be up to date is unreasonable for any LLM and we now have useful solutions to the training data issue.

If you need it to specify the latest version, don't say "latest". That word would be interpreted differently by humans as well.

Claude is well known at its one-shotting skills. But that's at the expense of strict instruction following adherence and thinner context (it doesn't spend as much time to gather context in larger codebases).

hyeomans• 6 months ago

Ty for the tip on context7 mcp btw

jtrn4• 6 months ago

Ok. You do you. I'll stick with the models that understand what latest version of a framework means.

stitched2gethr• 6 months ago

Perhaps if he was able to get Claude Code to do what he wanted in less time, and with a better experience, then maybe that's not a skill he (or the rest of us) want to develop.

tomashubelbauer5• 6 months ago

I am using GPT-5.2 Codex with reasoning set to high via OpenCode and Codex and when I ask it to fix an E2E test it tells me that it fixed it and prints a command I can run to test the changes, instead of checking whether it fixed the test and looping until it did. This is just one example of how lazy/stupid the model is. It _is_ a skill issue, on the model's part.

adammarples• 6 months ago

How would a person interpret the latest version of flowbite?

miki123211• 6 months ago

TBH, "use a package manager, don't specify versions manually unless necessary, don't edit package files manually" is an instructions that most agents still need to be given explicitly. They love manually editing package.json / cargo.toml / pyproject.toml / what have you, and using whatever version is given in their training data. They still don't have an intuition for which files should be manually written and which files should be generated by a command.

jtrn4• 5 months ago

I try to make it a point to acknowledge when I am wrong. And after some time, and maybe after the release of Codex 5.3, the Codex App is a VERY good agentic coder.

I stand by my initial impression, so far as the claim that it did piss me off, but I completely retract my prediction that Codex/OpenAI is going down the Nokia death spiral based on the performance of the current Codex App paired with the Codex 5.3 model.

I think a combination of the new model version, and me having maximum bad luck in my first test (it truly didn’t do that great), made me come to the wrong conclusion. Codex App is actually pretty good. Thanks for pushing back.

chandureddyvari• 6 months ago

Agreed, had the same experience. Codex feels lazy - I have to explicitly tell it to research existing code before it stops giving hand-wavy answers. Doc lookup is particularly bad; I even gave it access to a Context7 MCP server for documentation and it barely made a difference. The personality also feels off-putting, even after tweaking the experimental flag settings to make it friendlier.

For people suggesting it’s a skill issue: I’ve been using Claude Code for the past 6 months and I genuinely want to make Codex work - it was highly recommended by peers and friends. I’ve tried different model settings, explicitly instructed it to plan first and only execute after my approval, tested it on both Python and TypeScript backend codebases. Results are consistently underwhelming compared to Claude Code.

Claude Code just works for me out of the box. My default workflow is plan mode - a few iterations to nail the approach, then Claude one-shots the implementation after I approve. Haven’t been able to replicate anything close to that with Codex

dudeinhawaii• 6 months ago

Curious, are you doing the same planning with Codex out-of-band or otherwise? In order to have the same measurable outcome you'd need to perhaps use Codex in a plan state (there's experimental settings - not recommended) or other means (explicit detailed -reusable- prompt for planning a change). It's a missing feature if your preference is planning in CLI (I do not prefer this).

You are correct in that this mode isn't "out of the box" as it is with Claude (but I don't use it in Claude either).

My preference is to have smart models generate a plan with provided source. I wrote (with AI) a simple python tool that'll filter a codebase and let me select all files or just a subset. I then attach that as context and have a smart model with large context (usually Opus, GPT-5.2, and Gemini 3 Pro in parallel), give me their version of a plan. I then take the best parts of each plan, slap it into a single markdown and have Codex execute in a phased manner. I usually specify that the plan should be phased.

I prefer out-of-CLI planning because frankly it doesn't matter how good Codex or Claude Code dive in, they always miss something unless they read every single file and config. And if they do that, they tip over. Doing it out of band with specialized tools, I can ensure they give me a high quality plan that aligns with the code and expectations, in a single shot (much faster).

Then Claude/Codex/Gemini implement the phased plan - either all at once - or stepwise with me testing the app at each stage.

But yeah, it's not a skill issue on your part if you're used to Plan -> Implement within Claude Code. The Experimental /collab feature does this but it's not supported and more experimental than even the experimental settings.

rohansood15• 6 months ago

+1 to this. Been using Codex the last few months, and this morning I asked it to plan a change. It gave me generic instructions like 'Check if you're using X' or 'Determine if logic is doing Y' - I was like WTF.

dbbk2• 6 months ago

I just want Anthropic to spend like two weeks making their own "Codex app", but with Opus.

vcryan• 6 months ago

Another boring update from OpenAI. Why would I want an orchestration tool tied to one model? Part of the value of orchestration tools is using the most appropriate and/or cost effective model for the task, sub-task, etc

ChrisMarshallNY• 6 months ago

Eh. Kicked the tires for a few minutes. Back to the old clunker app.

No worries. I'm not their target demographic, anyway.

inercia• 6 months ago

Something similar but for any ACP server: https://github.com/inercia/mitto

elpakal2• 6 months ago

why would it need local network access though, I wonder?

dworks4• 6 months ago

Somewhat underwhelmed. I consider agents to be a sidetrack. The key insight from the Recursive Language Models paper is that requirements, implementation plans, and other types of core information should not be part of context but exist as immutable objects that can be referenced as a source of truth. In practice this just means creating an .md file per stage (spec, analysis, implementation plan, implementation summary, verification and test plan, manual qa plan, global state reference doc).

I created this using PLANS.md and it basically replicates a kanban/scrum process with gated approvals per stage, locked artifacts when it moves to next stage, etc. It works very well and it doesnt need a UI. Sure, I could have several agents running at the same time, but I believe manual QA is key to keeping the codebase clean, so time spent on this today means that future requirements can be implemented 10x faster than with a messy codebase.

energy1232• 6 months ago

This is what I've been doing. Iterating on specs is better than iterating on code. More token efficient and easier to review. Good code effortlessly follows from good specs. It's also a good way to stop the code turning into quicksand (aside from constraining the code with e2e tests, CLI shape, etc).

But what is your concept of "stages"? For me, the spec files are a MECE decomposition, each file is responsible for its unique silo (one file owns repo layout, etc), with cross references between them if needed to eliminate redundancy. There's no hierarchy between them. But I'm open to new approaches.

dworks4• 6 months ago

The stages are modelled after a kanban board. So you can have whichever stages you think are important for your LLM development workflow. These are mine:

00: Iterate on requirements with ChatGPT outside of the IDE. Save as a markdown requirements doc in the repo

01: Inside the IDE; Analysis of current codebase based on the scope of the requirements

02: Based on 00 and 01, write the implementation plan. Implement the plan

03: Verification of implementation coverage and testing

04: Implementation summary

05: Manual QA based on generated doc

06: Update global STATE.md and DECISIONS.md that documents the app, and the what and why of every requirement

Every stage has a single .md as output and after the stage is finished the doc is locked. Every stage takes the previous stages' docs as input.

I have a half-finished draft with more details and a benchmark (need to re-run it since a missing dependency interrupted the runs)

https://dilemmaworks.com/implementing-recursive-language-mod...

boppo1• 6 months ago

Which paper?

dworks4• 6 months ago

Recursive Language Models by Alex Zhang/MIT

scotty792• 6 months ago

An idea just came into my mind. What if an agent could spawn other agents and provide them with immutable resource files and a 'chrooted' mutable directory those spawned agents could use recursively to prepare immutable resources for other recursively called sub-agents. The immutability and chrooting could be enforced by the harness.

spruce_tips• 6 months ago

Tried it, not impressed. Terrible UX and generally just confusing. Didn't really intuitively know where to go and why. The thing that made me most mad was the clunkiness around pulling specific files into the chat input as context. Like wtf, bad, bad, bad!

indigodaddy5• 6 months ago

Can this interact with remote (over ssh) codex agents?

ttul4• 6 months ago

I had been procrastinating putting in the effort to find a decent web designer to redesign our company’s website because I couldn’t stomach the hours I would need to put in to educate them about our messaging and to slowly go around and around iteratively to get the design nailed.

Last week, I decided to try building the site myself using Codex (the terminal one). I chose Astro as the framework because I wanted to learn about it. I fed it some marketing framework materials (positioning statements and whatnot) and showed it some website designs that we like. I then asked it to produce a first cut and it one-shotted a pretty decent bit of output.

AGI is definitely a few more years away, because I’ve since invested probably 30 hours of iteration to make the site into something that is closer to what I eventually want to launch. But here’s the thing: I never intended for Codex to produce THE final website. But now I’m thinking, “maybe we can?” On my team, we have just enough expertise and design know-how to at least know what looks good and we are developers so we definitely know what good code looks like. And Codex is nailing it on both those fronts.

As I said, we’re far from AGI. There’s no way I can one-shot something like this. It requires iteration with humans who have years of “context” built up. But maybe the days of hiring a designer and just praying that they somehow get it right are behind us.

ttul4• 6 months ago

PS: Yes, I spent several hours on the weekend getting Codex to add animations, sound effects, and a mini game to our home page hero graphic. That was fun. I look forward to the creativity that people unleash with tools like this in the coming months.

twanlass• 6 months ago

Link to the site?

abustamam• 6 months ago

I think that's the real enabler. Iterating on some polish details that we know the shape of but is hard to get the nuances right.

motoboi• 6 months ago

No access via paid API? C’mon guys. Big enterprise consume codex and Claude via vertex and azure foundry, because it’s already available on their contracts.

And they don’t mind the usage cost. Please let me spend 5k monthly on this.

adav2• 6 months ago

Works fine with Azure setup in the config.toml because I think it’s Codex CLI underneath!

unvalley• 6 months ago

I'm waiting iOS version

guluarte• 6 months ago

cool, another mac app, fuck windows users i guess

lerp-io• 6 months ago

its a mac-only electron app

nsonha• 5 months ago

The OS is objectively broken (needs a MS account, ads and everything) so why go out of one's way to make that choice and then act all surprised?

vivzkestrel• 6 months ago

is this bye bye v0, bolt, lovable, base 44 and the 45456856468943659874651654896795256674 competitors that let you vibe code apps from their webapp?

L0Wigh• 6 months ago

AI companies are trying way too hard to make us think that we can be the copilot now. 90% of the time (if not more) you definitely need to recode what the model spits to you. Vibe coders with no experience in coding are just creating work for coders that do know what they are doing

vinhnx• 6 months ago

Best part of the Codex app launch is that, OpenAI has opened the whole Codex ecosystem (CLI, Web, IDE Extensions) for free ChatGPT users. And x2 usage for Plus, Pro. This is I think to gain developers' attraction from Claude Code.

easeout• 6 months ago

Why make a desktop windowing system app, for a user group who runs a bunch of simultaneous terminal sessions with tear-off tabs or tmux panels, and then force everything into one window that can only display a single session at a time?

The Open button and then codex resume --last is good, but it's a waste and The Wrong Abstraction not to make instantiable conversation windows from the get-go.

ensocode• 6 months ago

every day waking up, reading hn and thinking "This new AI xy is insane - it will change everything" then start my daily work in low code integration and thinking "How long will this last?

Bishonen883• 6 months ago

Crazy free tier. I reckon I used ~2 weeks of the claude $20 subscription within an hour. Spawned like 12 semi big tasks and I still didn't see no warnings.

ProofHouse• 6 months ago

Not totally understanding this. Crazy free tier but that it used a crazy amount of tokens that cost you? Sry just trynna see what you’re saying

Bishonen883• 6 months ago

My bad then. I meant that it's "Crazy Good" as in that the free tier gave me a tremendous amount of tokens.

What I didn't realize though, is that the limit doesn't reset each 5 hours as is the case for claude. I hit the limit of the free tier about 2 hours in, and while I was expecting to be able to continue later today, it alerts me that I can continue in a week.

So my hype for the amount of tokens one gets compared to claude was a bit too eager. Hitting the limit and having to wait a week probably means that we get a comparable token amount vs the $20 claude plan. I wonder how much more I'd get when buying the $20 plus package. The pricing page doesn't make that clear (since there was no free plan before yesterday I guess): https://developers.openai.com/codex/pricing/

sunaookami2• 6 months ago

Why do I have to manually switch between medium, high, extra high?? This is comedy at this point, Claude Code "just works" without having to think about obscure stuff like this and it still produces a better output. OpenAI is just embarassing at this point, ChatGPT also got ruined with gpt-5.2 which talks and has the brain of a 2 year old, even gpt-3.5-turbo was better. Did they still have no successful training run?

prodigycorp8• 6 months ago

Claude responds differently to "think", "think hard", and "think very hard". Just because it's hidden to you, doesn't mean a user doesn't have a choice.

Saying gpt-3.5-turbo is better than gpt-5.2 makes me think something you got some of them hidden motives.

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/common-workflows#use-extende...

Computer02• 6 months ago

’’’Phrases like “think”, “think hard”, “ultrathink”, and “think more” are interpreted as regular prompt instructions and don’t allocate thinking tokens.’’’

franze• 6 months ago

has someone figured out on how to set it to yolo mode yet? super unuseable with this constant asking ....

BOOSTERHIDROGEN• 6 months ago

Would like to see non-dev workflow that benefit from this app.

RayVR• 6 months ago

I'm sorry, but the music on the demo video is the most atrocious nonsense. I know it's crazy, but it makes me hate the app. openAI is falling off hard.

energy1232• 6 months ago

Double the codex limits for 2 months is very compelling. The limits are already generous.

OldGreenYodaGPT• 6 months ago

I really like it!

epsteingpt• 6 months ago

slow

anupamchugh• 6 months ago

i would like to see a mobile app for this to vibe code on the fly. currently the DIY options are good but clumsy UX wise as they’re workarounds. if i can open worktrees from an ios app it would be great.

g_host56• 6 months ago

I just downloaded and didn't give it access to my zsh shell. But it already had access. Have a feeling it has the ability to read my contents, any ideas?

It would suck if they got my project data to train, this way.

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