Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unrolling the Codex agent loop

openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 220 posts

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#51

Post by postalcoder »

behnamoh wrote: post #50
postalcoder wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Codex is wicked efficient with context windows, with the tradeoff of time spent. It hurts the flow state, but overall I've found that it's the best at having long conversations/coding sessions.

yeah it throws me out of the "flow", which I don't like. maybe the cerebras deal helps with that.

It's worth it at the end of the day because it tends to properly scope out changes and generate complete edits, whereas I always have to bring Opus around to fix things it didn't fix or manually loop in some piece of context that it didn't find before.

That said, faster inference can't come soon enough.

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#52

Post by behnamoh »

estimator7292 wrote: post #48
behnamoh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CC is the clunkiest PoS software I've ever used in terminal; feels like it was vibe coded and anthroshit doesn't give a shit

All of these agentic UIs are vibe coded. They advertise the percent of AI written code in the tool.

which begs the question: which came first—agentic AI tools or the AI that vibe coded them?

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#53

Post by [deleted] »

written-beyond wrote: post #9

Has anyone seriously used codex cli? I was using LLMs for code gen usually through the vscode codex extension, Gemini cli and Claude Code cli. The performance of all 3 of them is utter dog shit, Gemini cli just randomly breaks and starts spamming content trying to reorient itself after a while. However, I decided to try codex cli after hearing they rebuilt it from the ground up and used rust(instead of JS, not implyi…

[deleted]

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#54

Post by behnamoh »

postalcoder wrote: post #51
behnamoh wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah it throws me out of the "flow", which I don't like. maybe the cerebras deal helps with that.

It's worth it at the end of the day because it tends to properly scope out changes and generate complete edits, whereas I always have to bring Opus around to fix things it didn't fix or manually loop in some piece of context that it didn't find before. That said, faster inference can't come soon enough.

> That said, faster inference can't come soon enough.

why is that? technical limits? I know cerebras struggles with compute and they stopped their coding plan (sold out!). their arch also hasn't been used with large models like gpt-5.2. the largest they support (if not quantized) is glm 4.7 which is <500B params.

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#55

Post by olliepro »

jumploops wrote: post #4

One thing that surprised me when diving into the Codex internals was that the reasoning tokens persist during the agent tool call loop, but are discarded after every user turn. This helps preserve context over many turns, but it can also mean some context is lost between two related user turns. A strategy that's helped me here, is having the model write progress updates (along with general plans/specs/debug/etc.) to…

I made a skill that reflects on past conversations via parallel headless codex sessions. Its great for context building. Repo: https://github.com/olliepro/Codex-Reflect-Skill

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#56

Post by postalcoder »

The best part about this blog post is that none of it is a surprise – Codex CLI is open source. It's nice to be able to go through the internals without having to reverse engineer it.

Their communication is exceptional, too. Eric Traut (of Pyright fame) is all over the issues and PRs.

https://github.com/openai/codex

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#57

Post by westoncb »

Interesting that compaction is done using an encrypted message that "preserves the model's latent understanding of the original conversation":

> Since then, the Responses API has evolved to support a special /responses/compact endpoint (opens in a new window) that performs compaction more efficiently. It returns a list of items (opens in a new window) that can be used in place of the previous input to continue the conversation while freeing up the context window. This list includes a special type=compaction item with an opaque encrypted_content item that preserves the model’s latent understanding of the original conversation. Now, Codex automatically uses this endpoint to compact the conversation when the auto_compact_limit (opens in a new window) is exceeded.

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#59

Post by zoho_seni »

behnamoh wrote: post #16
ewoodrich wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenCode also has an extremely fast and reliable UI compared to the other CLIs. I’ve been using Codex more lately since I’m cancelling my Claude Pro plan and it’s solid but haven’t spent nearly as much time compared to Claude Code or Gemini CLI yet. But tbh OpenAI openly supporting OpenCode is the bigger draw for me on the plan but do want to spend more time with native Codex as a base of comparison against OpenCode…

Seconded. I find codex lacks only two things: - hooks (this is a big one) - better UI to show me what changes are going to be made. the second one makes a huge diff and it's the main reason I stopped using opencode (lots of other reasons too). in CC, I am shown a nice diff that I can approve/reject. in codex, the AI makes lots of changes but doesn't pin point what changes it's doing or going to make.

You can't see diffs in git?

How you using hooks?

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#60

Post by redox99 »

postalcoder wrote: post #56

The best part about this blog post is that none of it is a surprise – Codex CLI is open source. It's nice to be able to go through the internals without having to reverse engineer it. Their communication is exceptional, too. Eric Traut (of Pyright fame) is all over the issues and PRs. https://github.com/openai/codex

For some reason a lot of people are unaware that Claude Code is proprietary.
Post reply on HN