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The Codex App

openai.com

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Re: The Codex App

#281
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hist…

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.

-p

Re: The Codex App

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years.

You will be outcompeted if you waste your time reinventing the wheel and optimizing for stuff that doesn't matter. There is some market for highly optimized apps like e.g. Sublime Text, but you can clearly see that the companies behind them are struggling.

Re: The Codex App

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

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...)

Agree, another improvement i'd like along the lines or renames is lsp suggestions for method names, enums, functions, etc The llm should be able to autocomplete given lsp available symbols, this way it would avoid far less hallucinated methods

Re: The Codex App

#284
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.

Re: The Codex App

#285
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

Re: The Codex App

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

cursor?

from what I can tell, the people behind windsurf were at it first

Re: The Codex App

#287

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.

Replit already does this

Re: The Codex App

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully believe that if I didn’t review its output and ask it to clean it up it would become unmaintainable real quick. The trick I’ve found though is to be detailed enough in the design from both a technical and non-technical level, sometimes iterating a few time on it with the agent before telling it to go for it (which can easily take 30 minutes) That’s how I used to deal with L4, except codex codes much faster (b…

It’s funny over the years I went from 1. I like being hands on keyboard and picking up a slice of work I can do by myself with a clean interface that others can use - a ticket taking code monkey. 2. I like being a team lead /architect where my vision can be larger than what I can do in 40 hours a week even if I hate the communication and coordination overhead of dealing with two or three other people 3. I love being…

Moral of your story.

Each and everyone of us is able to write their own story, and come up with their own 'Moral'.

Settling for less (if AI is a productivity booster, which is debatable) doesn't equal being screwed. There is wisdom in reaching your 'enough' point.

Re: The Codex App

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...)

Agree, another improvement i'd like along the lines or renames is lsp suggestions for method names, enums, functions, etc The llm should be able to autocomplete given lsp available symbols, this way it would avoid far less hallucinated methods

Claude, at least, already supports LSP servers though. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/plugins-reference#lsp-server...

Re: The Codex App

#290

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, Blende…

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.

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