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OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal

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Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal

#161

Post by thelittleone »

asadm wrote: post #149
brandall10 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just select Gemini Pro 2.5 in Copilot with Edit mode? Virtually unlimited use without extra fees. Copilot used to be useless, but over the last few months has become quite excellent once edit mode was added.

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.

Regarding context reduction. This got me wondering. If I use my own API key, there is no way for the IDE or coplilot provider to benefit other than monthly sub. But if I am using their provided model with tokens from the monthly subscription, they are incentivized to charge me based on tokens I submit to them, but then optimize that and pass on a smaller request to the LLM and get more margin. Is that what you are referring to?

Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal

#162

Post by asadm »

jwpapi wrote: post #159
asadm wrote: post #143

These days, I usually paste my entire (or some) repo into gemini and then APPLY changes back into my code using this handy script i wrote: https://github.com/asadm/vibemode I have tried aider/copilot/continue/etc. But they lack in one way or the other.

It’s not just about saving money or making less mistakes its also about iteration speed. I can’t believe this process is remotely comparable to aider. In aider everything is loaded in memory I can add drop files in terminal, discuss in terminal, switch models, every change is a commit, run terminal commands with ! at the start. Full codebase is more expensive and slower than relevant files. I understand when you don’…

I am at my 5th project in this workflow and these are of different types too:

- an embedded project for esp32 (100k tokens)

- visual inertial odometry algorithm (200k+ tokens)

- a web app (60k tokens)

- the tool itself mentioned above (~30k tokens)

it has worked well enough for me. Other methods have not.

Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal

#163

Post by mrcwinn »

zora_goron wrote: post #145

Anyone have any anecdotes on how expensive this is to operate, ie compared to performing the same task via Claude Code?

A one line change, that took a decent amount of reasoning to get to for a large codebase, cost $3.57 just now. I used the o3 model. The quality and the reasoning was excellent. Cheaper than an engineer.

Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal

#164

Post by AaronAPU »

asadm wrote: post #149
brandall10 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just select Gemini Pro 2.5 in Copilot with Edit mode? Virtually unlimited use without extra fees. Copilot used to be useless, but over the last few months has become quite excellent once edit mode was added.

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.

Is that why it’s so bad? I’ve been blown away by how bad it is. Never had a single successful edit.

The code completion is chefs kiss though.

Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal

#165

Post by Aeolun »

strangescript wrote: post #157
gklitt wrote: post #74

I 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…

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.

> 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.

Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal

#166

Post by jwrallie »

> Does it work on Windows? > Not directly. It requires Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) – Codex has been tested on macOS and Linux with Node ≥ 22.

I've been seeing similar things in different projects lately. WSL in long term seems to be reducing the scope of what people decide to develop natively on Windows.

Seeing the pressure to move "apps" to the Windows Store, VSCode connecting to remote (or WSL) for development, and Azure, it does seem intentional.

Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal

#167

Post by throwaway314155 »

jwrallie wrote: post #166

> Does it work on Windows? > Not directly. It requires Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) – Codex has been tested on macOS and Linux with Node ≥ 22. I've been seeing similar things in different projects lately. WSL in long term seems to be reducing the scope of what people decide to develop natively on Windows. Seeing the pressure to move "apps" to the Windows Store, VSCode connecting to remote (or WSL) for developme…

The developer experience of linux is simply more popular.

Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal

#168

Post by asadm »

brandall10 wrote: post #156
asadm wrote: post #149

Earlier 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.

FWIW, Edit mode gives the impression of doing this, vs. originally only passing the context visible from the open window. You can choose files to include and they don't appear to be truncated in any way. Though to be fair, I haven't checked the network traffic, but it appears to operate in this fashion from day to day use.

i will try again but last i tried adding folder to edit mode and asking it to list down files it sees, it didn't list them all down.

Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal

#169

Post by bredren »

brandall10 wrote: post #156
asadm wrote: post #149

Earlier 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.

FWIW, Edit mode gives the impression of doing this, vs. originally only passing the context visible from the open window. You can choose files to include and they don't appear to be truncated in any way. Though to be fair, I haven't checked the network traffic, but it appears to operate in this fashion from day to day use.

I’d be curious to hear what actually goes through the network request.

Re: OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal

#170

Post by asadm »

AaronAPU wrote: post #164
asadm wrote: post #149

Earlier 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.

Is that why it’s so bad? I’ve been blown away by how bad it is. Never had a single successful edit. The code completion is chefs kiss though.

probably but also most models start to lose it after a certain context size (usually 10-20k). Which is why I use gemini (via aistudio) for my workflow.
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