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

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

#41

Post by dingnuts »

cube2222 wrote: post #31
cglong wrote: post #22

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

Coding agents use extreme numbers of tokens, you’d be getting rate limited effectively immediately. A typical small-medium PR with Claude Code for me is ~$10-15 of API credits.

Too expensive for me to use for fun. Cheap enough to put me out of a job. Great. Love it. So excited. Doesn't make me want to go full Into The Wild at all.

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

#42

Post by ai-christianson »

cube2222 wrote: post #31
cglong wrote: post #22

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

Coding agents use extreme numbers of tokens, you’d be getting rate limited effectively immediately. A typical small-medium PR with Claude Code for me is ~$10-15 of API credits.

I've ended up with $5K+ in a month using sonnet 3.7, had to dial it back.

I'm much happier with gemini 2.5 pro right now for high performance at a much more reasonable cost (primarily using with RA.Aid, but I've tried it with Windsurf, cline, and roo.)

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

#43

Post by ChadMoran »

retinaros wrote: post #34
cube2222 wrote: post #26

Fingers crossed for this to work well! Claude Code is pretty excellent. I’m actually legitimately surprised how good it is, since other coding agents I’ve used before have mostly been a letdown, which made me only use Claude in direct change prompting with Zed (“implement xyz here”, “rewrite this function with abc”, etc), so very hands-on. So I’ve went into trying out Claude Code rather pessimistically, and now I’m u…

too expensive. I cant understand why everyone is into claude code vs using claude in cursor or windsurf.

Claude Code has been able to produce results equivalent to a junior engineer. I spent about $300 API credits in a month but got the value out of it far surpassing that.

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

#44

Post by danenania »

_joel wrote: post #39
danenania wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends a lot on how you value your time. I'm personally willing to spend hundreds or thousands per month happily if it saves me enough hours. I'd estimate that if I were to do consulting, I'd likely be charging in the $150-250 per hour range, so by my math, it's pretty easy to justify any tools that save me even a few hours per month.

You get the same results for cheaper by using a different tool (Windsurf's better imho).

That may be, but I think tools with a fixed monthly fee are always going to have an incentive to reduce their own costs on the backend and route you toward less capable models, cut down context size, produce less output, stop before the task is truly finished, etc.

Given how much time these models can save me, I'd rather optimize for capability and just accept whatever the price is as a cost of doing business. (Within reason I guess—I probably wouldn't go beyond $2-3k per month at this point, unless there was very clear ROI on that spend.)

Also, it's not only about saving time. More powerful AI tools allow me to build things it would otherwise be impossible to build... that's just as important as the time/cost equation.

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

#45

Post by ChadMoran »

_joel wrote: post #39
danenania wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends a lot on how you value your time. I'm personally willing to spend hundreds or thousands per month happily if it saves me enough hours. I'd estimate that if I were to do consulting, I'd likely be charging in the $150-250 per hour range, so by my math, it's pretty easy to justify any tools that save me even a few hours per month.

You get the same results for cheaper by using a different tool (Windsurf's better imho).

I've spent more than 40 hours/week and close to $1,000 in API credits using these tools. For me the ranking goes. But, we all will have difference experiences.

1. Claude Code 2. Cursor 3. Cline. 4. Windsurf

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

#46

Post by ChadMoran »

retinaros wrote: post #40
danenania wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends a lot on how you value your time. I'm personally willing to spend hundreds or thousands per month happily if it saves me enough hours. I'd estimate that if I were to do consulting, I'd likely be charging in the $150-250 per hour range, so by my math, it's pretty easy to justify any tools that save me even a few hours per month.

ok but in what way a terminal is a bettter UI than an IDE? I am trying all of them on a weekly basis and windsurf UX seems miles ahead/ more efficient than a terminal. that is also what OAI believes or else they wouldnt try to buy it

Not a better UI at all but seems like they're able to then focus on what matters in these early stages and that's quality of output.

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

#47

Post by flakiness »

https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-cli/src/comp...

Hey comment this thing in!

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

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

#48

Post by georgewsinger »

danenania wrote: post #12

Cool to see more interesting terminal based options! Looking forward to trying this out. I've been working on something related—Plandex[1], an open source AI coding agent that is particularly focused on large projects and complex tasks. I launched the v2 a few weeks ago and it is now running well. In terms of how to place it in the landscape, it’s more agentic than aider, more configurable and tightly controlled than…

Insane that people would downvote a totally reasonable comment offering a competing alternative. HN is supposed to be a community of tech builders.

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

#49

Post by jumploops »

(copied from the o3 + o4-mini thread)

The big step function here seems to be RL on tool calling.

Claude 3.7/3.5 are the only models that seem to be able to handle "pure agent" usecases well (agent in a loop, not in an agentic workflow scaffold[0]).

OpenAI has made a bet on reasoning models as the core to a purely agentic loop, but it hasn't worked particularly well yet (in my own tests, though folks have hacked a Claude Code workaround[1]).

o3-mini has been better at some technical problems than 3.7/3.5 (particularly refactoring, in my experience), but still struggles with long chains of tool calling.

My hunch is that these new models were tuned _with_ OpenAI Codex[2], which is presumably what Anthropic was doing internally with Claude Code on 3.5/3.7

tl;dr - GPT-3 launched with completions (predict the next token), then OpenAI fine-tuned that model on "chat completions" which then led GPT-3.5/GPT-4, and ultimately the success of ChatGPT. This new agent paradigm, requires fine-tuning on the LLM interacting with itself (thinking) and with the outside world (tools), sans any human input.

[0]https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-age...

[1]https://github.com/1rgs/claude-code-proxy

[2]https://openai.com/index/openai-codex/

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

#50

Post by primitivesuave »

udbhavs wrote: post #13

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

You could create a shell function - e.g. `codex() { OPENAI="xyz" codex "$@" }'. To call the original command use `command codex ...`.

People downvoting legitimate questions on HN should be ashamed of themselves.

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