Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you still working 40 hours a week? If so, what's the difference?
Accomplishing more in that 40 hours?
And being paid more? Most salaried employees would not be.
OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
201–210 of 298 posts
Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
#202So a crappy version of aider?
The AI companies don't understand that they're the commodity. The real tools are the open source glue (today: aider) that bring the models into conversation with data and meaningmakers like ourselves.
Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Its not cheap, but its by far the best, most consistent experience I have had. It’s too expensive for what it does though. And it starts failing rapidly when it exhausts the context window.
I keep seeing this sentiment and it's wild to me. Sure, it might cost a few dollars here and there. But what I've personally been getting from it, for that cost, is so far away from "expensive" it's laughable. Not only does it do things I don't want to do, in a _super_ efficient manner. It does things I don't know how to do - contextually, within my own project, such that when it's done I _do_ know how to do it. Like…
This comment echoes my own experience with Claude. Especially the advice about only pulling in the context you need.
I'm a paying customer and I know my time is sufficiently valuable that this kind of technology pays for itself.
As an analogy, I liken it to a scribe (author's assistant).
Your comment has lots of useful hints -- thanks for taking the time to write them up!
Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
copilot (and others) try to be too smart and do context reduction (to save their own wallets). I want ENTIRETY of the files I attached to context, not RAG-ed version of it.
I believe this is the root of the problem for all agentic coding solutions. They are gimping the full context through fancy function calling and tool use to reduce the full context that is being sent through the API. Problem with this is you can never know what context is actually needed for the problem to be solved in the best way. The funny thing is, this type of behavior actually leads many people to believe these…
OpenAI shared chart about performance drop with large context like 500k tokens etc. So you still want to limit the context not only for the cost but performance as well. You also probably want to limit context to speedup inference and get reponse faster.
I agree though that a lot of those agents are black boxes and hard to even learn how to best combine .rules, llms.txt, prd, mcp, web search, function call, memory. Most IDEs don't provide output where you can inspect final prompts etc to see how those are executed - maybe you have to use some MITMproxy to inspect requests etc but some tool would be useful to learn best practices.
I will be trying more roo code and cline since they open source and you can at least see system prompts etc.
Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like the terminal UX because VS Code (and any forks of it) is not my editor of choice, and swapping around to use an editor just for AI coding is annoying (I was doing that with the Zed Assistant a lot). With Claude Code I can stay in Goland, and have Claude Code in the terminal.
You could also try JetBrains' Junie and Sourcegraph Cody.
windsurf also have plugins to jetbrains - they rebranded the whole company from codeium to windsurf and their jetbrains plugin also support cascade.
Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Its not cheap, but its by far the best, most consistent experience I have had. It’s too expensive for what it does though. And it starts failing rapidly when it exhausts the context window.
I keep seeing this sentiment and it's wild to me. Sure, it might cost a few dollars here and there. But what I've personally been getting from it, for that cost, is so far away from "expensive" it's laughable. Not only does it do things I don't want to do, in a _super_ efficient manner. It does things I don't know how to do - contextually, within my own project, such that when it's done I _do_ know how to do it. Like…
How can it be a skill problem when the tool itself is sold as being skilled?
Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
#207Am I the only one underwhelmed by Claude Code (which most comments here claim is better than Codex)?
Anecdotal experience: asked it to change instances of a C++ class Foo to a compatible one Bar, it did that but failed to add the required include where it made the change.
Yes, I'm sure that with enough prompting/hand-holding it could do this fine. Is it too much to expect basics like this out of the box, though? If so, then I, for one, still can't relate to the current level of enthusiasm.
Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
#208I tried one task head-to-head with Codex o4-mini vs Claude Code: writing documentation for a tricky area of a medium-sized codebase. Claude Code did great and wrote pretty decent docs. Codex didn't do well. It hallucinated a bunch of stuff that wasn't in the code, and completely misrepresented the architecture - it started talking about server backends and REST APIs in an app that doesn't have any of that. I'm curiou…
[deleted]
Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
too expensive. I cant understand why everyone is into claude code vs using claude in cursor or windsurf.
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.
> if it saves me enough hours
You're being paid to type? I want your job.
Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I keep seeing this sentiment and it's wild to me. Sure, it might cost a few dollars here and there. But what I've personally been getting from it, for that cost, is so far away from "expensive" it's laughable. Not only does it do things I don't want to do, in a _super_ efficient manner. It does things I don't know how to do - contextually, within my own project, such that when it's done I _do_ know how to do it. Like…
How can it be a skill problem when the tool itself is sold as being skilled?
You're using it wrong, you're using the wrong version etc etc insert all the excuses how it's never the tool but the users fault.