I've had great results with the Amazon Q developer cli, ever since it became agentic. I believe it's using claude-3.7-sonnet under the hood.
+1 this has become my go to cli tool now, very impressed with it
OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
211–220 of 298 posts
Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
This problem is real. Claude Projects, chatgpt projects, Sourcegraph Cody context building, MCP file systems, all of these are black boxes of what I can only describe as lossy compression of context. Each is incentivized to deliver ~”pretty good” results at the highest token compression possible. The best way around this I’ve found is to just own the web clients by including structured, concatenation related files di…
filekitty is pretty cool!
Thank you! I was glad to read your comments here and see your project.
I have encountered this issue of reincorporation of LLM code recommendations back into a project so I’m interested in exploring your take.
I told a colleague that I thought excellent use of copy paste and markdown were some of the chief skills of working with gen AI for code right now.
This and context management are as important as prompting.
It makes the details of the UI choices for copying web chat conversations or their segments so strangely important.
Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
#213So a crappy version of aider?
Aider doesn't have a more agentic/full-auto mode (at least not yet, there's a promising PR for this in review).
There may or may not also be some finessing necessary in the prompting and feedback loop regardless of model, which some tools may do better than others.
Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
#214Here is the prompt template, in case you're interested: const prefix = `You are operating as and within the Codex CLI, a terminal-based agentic coding assistant built by OpenAI. It wraps OpenAI models to enable natural language interaction with a local codebase. You are expected to be precise, safe, and helpful. You can: - Receive user prompts, project context, and files. - Stream responses and emit function calls (e…
> built by OpenAI many moons ago What’s with this writing style in a prompt? Is there a reason they write like that? Or does it just not matter so why not?
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Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
#215Earlier 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…
True. Matches my experience. It takes much effort to get really proficient with ai. It's like learning to ride a wild horse. Your senior dev skills will sure come handy in this ride but don't expect it to work like some google query
Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claude Code still feels superior. o4-mini has all sorts of issues. o3 is better but at that point, you aren't saving money so who cares. I feel like people are sleeping on Claude Code for one reason or another. Its not cheap, but its by far the best, most consistent experience I have had.
"gemini 2.5 pro exp" is superior to Claude Sonnet 3.7 when I use it with Aider [1]. And it is free (with some high limit). [1] https://aider.chat/
Compared to cline aider had no chance, the last time I tried it (4 month ago). Has it really changed? Always thought cline is superior because it focuses on sonnet with all its bells an whistles. While aider tries to be an universal ide coding agent which works well with all models.
When I try gemmini 2.5 pro exp with cline it does very well but often fails to use the tools provided by cline which makes it way less expensive while failing random basic tasks sonnet does in its sleep. I pay the extra to save the time.
Do not get me wrong. Maybe I am totally outdated with my opinion. It is hard to keep up these days.
Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
#217If one of these tools has broad model support (like aider) it would be a game changer.
Cursor agent? That's what I'm using now instead of Claude Code.
Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
#218I've had great results with the Amazon Q developer cli, ever since it became agentic. I believe it's using claude-3.7-sonnet under the hood.
How does it compare to Claude Code
Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claude Code still feels superior. o4-mini has all sorts of issues. o3 is better but at that point, you aren't saving money so who cares. I feel like people are sleeping on Claude Code for one reason or another. Its not cheap, but its by far the best, most consistent experience I have had.
Claude Code is just way too expensive. These days I’m using Amazon Q Pro on the CLI. Very similar experience to Claude Code minus a few batteries. But it’s capped at $20/mo and won’t set my credit card on fire.
Is it using one of these models? https://openrouter.ai/models?q=amazon
Seems 4x costlier than my Aider+Openrouter. Since I'm less about vibes or huge refactoring, my (first and only) bill is <5 usd with Gemini. These models will halve that.
Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal
#220Earlier 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?
A junior developer is skilled too, but still requires a senior’s guidance to keep them focused and on track. Just because a tool has built in intelligence doesn’t mean it can read your intentions from nothing if you fail to communicate to it well.