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The Codex App

openai.com

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Re: The Codex App

#581

Post by 827a »

OlympicMarmoto wrote: post #220

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…

It's baffling to me that people still throw around the word "native" like it means anything. Go use VSCode or Obsidian, then go use Apple Music. Electron can be so much better than anything native. The problem isn't that macos ChatGPT, Codex, or Claude isn't native. Their apps just really suck. They're poorly engineered and bad.

Re: The Codex App

#583

Post by barumrho »

827a wrote: post #581
OlympicMarmoto wrote: post #220

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…

It's baffling to me that people still throw around the word "native" like it means anything. Go use VSCode or Obsidian, then go use Apple Music. Electron can be so much better than anything native. The problem isn't that macos ChatGPT, Codex, or Claude isn't native. Their apps just really suck. They're poorly engineered and bad.

Apple Music isn't native either.

Re: The Codex App

#584

Post by 827a »

barumrho wrote: post #583
827a wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's baffling to me that people still throw around the word "native" like it means anything. Go use VSCode or Obsidian, then go use Apple Music. Electron can be so much better than anything native. The problem isn't that macos ChatGPT, Codex, or Claude isn't native. Their apps just really suck. They're poorly engineered and bad.

Apple Music isn't native either.

Oh right, I forgot, "native" just means "good". So if an app is bad, it can't be native, and if an electron app is actually good its because they're doing crazy optimizations that aren't feasible for mortal souls so don't even think about it. This is the "Hackers News Law of Application Nativeness".

Re: The Codex App

#585

Post by pydry »

holmesworcester wrote: post #499
pydry wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You reduce development effort by a third Done by the company which sells software which is supposed to reduce it tenfold?

> You don't casually give up massive abstraction wins Value is value, and levers are levers, regardless of the resources you have or the difficulty of the problem you're solving. If they can save effort with Electron and put that effort into things their research says users care about more, everyone wins.

That's like a luxury lumber company stuffing its showrooms full of ikea furniture.

Re: The Codex App

#586

Post by joefourier »

eloisant wrote: post #573
gbalduzzi wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It baffles me how much the discourse over native apps rarely takes this into consideration. You reduce development effort by a third, it is ok to debate whether a company so big should invest into a better product anyway but it is pretty clear why they are doing this

The real question is how much better are native apps compared to Electron apps. Yes that would take much disk space, but it takes 50Mb or 500Mb isn't noticeable for most users. Same goes for memory, there is a gain for sure but unless you open your system monitor you wouldn't know. So even if it's something the company could afford, is it even worth it? Also it's not just about cost but opportunity cost. If a feature…

It absolutely is noticeable the moment you have to run several of these electron “apps” at once.

I have a MacBook with 16GB of RAM and I routinely run out of memory from just having Slack, Discord, Cursor, Figma, Spotify and a couple of Firefox tabs open. I went back to listening to mp3s with a native app to have enough memory to run Docker containers for my dev server.

Come on, I could listen to music, program, chat on IRC or Skype, do graphic design, etc. with 512MB of DDR2 back in 2006, and now you couldn’t run a single one of those Electron apps with that amount of memory. How can a billion dollar corporation doing music streaming not have the resources to make a native app, but the Songbird team could do it for free back in 2006?

I’ve shipped cross platform native UIs by myself. It’s not that hard, and with skyrocketing RAM prices, users might be coming back to 8GB laptops. There’s no justification for a big corporation not to have a native app other than developer negligence.

Re: The Codex App

#587

Post by knoopx »

gloosx wrote: post #451
OlympicMarmoto wrote: post #220

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…

>This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron. Who told you that? You can write entire C libraries and call them from Electron just fine. Browser is a native application after all. All this "native applications" debate boils down to the UI implementation strategy. Maintaining three separate UI stacks (WinUI, SwiftUI, GTK/Qt) is dramatically more expensive and slower to iterate…

the three OSes is BS, none of them cares about linux

Re: The Codex App

#588

Post by coro_1 »

iamsaitam wrote: post #491
OlympicMarmoto wrote: post #220

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…

Why should they? It's not like these apps will be around for long

The brief video OpenAI did sets the stage as I see it - for an evolving kind of engineer. Who will think and design as much as know code.

Re: The Codex App

#589

Post by LinXitoW »

jarek-foksa wrote: post #282
OlympicMarmoto wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People absolutely care, but the issue is that no single company/app is really responsible. It's the tragedy of the commons, but for users RAM. No one electron app uses all the RAM, but just a couple are enough to make a common 16GB machine slow down massively.

Re: The Codex App

#590

Post by tomashubelbauer »

theshrike79 wrote: post #538
tomashubelbauer wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am using GPT-5.2 Codex with reasoning set to high via OpenCode and Codex and when I ask it to fix an E2E test it tells me that it fixed it and prints a command I can run to test the changes, instead of checking whether it fixed the test and looping until it did. This is just one example of how lazy/stupid the model is. It _is_ a skill issue, on the model's part.

Codex runs in a stupidly tight sandbox and because of that it refuses to run anything. But using the same model through pi, for example, it's super smart because pi just doesn't have ANY safeguards :D

I'll take this as my sign to give Pi a shot then :D Edit: I don't want to speak too son, but this Pi thing is really growing on me so far… Thank you!
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