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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

#181
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.

"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/

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

#182
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.

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…

> The best way around this I’ve found is to just own the web clients by including structured, concatenation related files directly in chat contexts.

Same. I used to run a bash script that concatenates files I'm interested in and annotates their path/name to the top in a comment. I haven't needed that recently as I think the # of attachments for Claude has increased (or I haven't needed as many small disparate files at once)

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

#183
post #181

Earlier 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/

Don't they train on your inputs if you use the free Ai studio api key?

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

#184
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I like to use "Open Editors". That way, it's only the code I'm currently working on that is added to the context, seems more a more natural way to work.

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude Code has a closed license https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/LICENSE.... There is fork named Anon Kode https://github.com/dnakov/anon-kode which can use more models and non-Anthropic ones. But the license is unclear for it. It's interesting to see codex to be Apache License. Maybe somebody extends it to be usable with competing models.

If it's a fork of the proprietary code, the license is pretty clear, it's violating copyright. Now whether or not anthropic care enough to enforce their license is separate issue, but it seems unwise to make much of an investment in it.

They call it a "fork" but it doesn't share any code. It's from scratch afaik

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

#186
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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/

Don't they train on your inputs if you use the free Ai studio api key?

speaking for myself, I am happy to make that trade. As long as I get unrestricted access to latest one. Heck, most of my code now is written by gemini anyway haha.

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

#187
post #165

Earlier 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.

> 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.

If you get a hang of controlling costs, it's much cheaper. If you're exhausting the context window, I'm not surprised you're seeing high cost.

Be aware of the "cache".

Tell it to read specific files, never use /compact (that'll bust cache, if you need to, you're going back and forth too much or using too many files at once).

Never edit files manually during a session (that'll bust cache). THIS INCLUDES LINT.

Have a clear goal in mind and keep sessions to as few messages as possible.

Write / generate markdown files with needed documentation using claude.ai, and save those as files in the repo and tell it to read that file as part of a question.

I'm at about ~$0.5-0.75 for most "tasks" I give it. I'm not a super heavy user, but it definitely helps me (it's like having a super focused smart intern that makes dumb mistakes).

If i need to feed it a ton of docs etc. for some task, it'll be more in the few $, rather than For hobby stuff, it adds up - totally.

For a company, massively worth it. Insanely cheap productivity boost (if developers are responsible / don't get lazy / don't misuse it).

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

#188

If one of these tools has broad model support (like aider) it would be a game changer.

https://github.com/BismuthCloud/cli We’ve been working to open source ours. Should work with any open router model that supports tool calling. Ours is agentic mode first. Guess this is me dropping it live there may be rough edges as we’ve been prepping it for a little bit

Oh cool. How do you feel it compares to Claude Code? (Serious question, but I realize I’m asking a biased source. :) )

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

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, increasingly, how the company values your time. If Claude Code can make a $100K/year dev 10% more productive, it's worth it to the employer to pay anything under $1600/month for it (assuming fully loaded cost of the employee to the business is twice salary).

Productivity and business value are not linearly related. It could provide 0 business value to make someone 10% more productive.

I was thinking of productivity as generation of business value rather than something less correlated like lines of code produced. But sure, it's probably more accurate to directly say "business value".

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

#190
post #63

It's very interesting that both OpenAI and Anthropic are releasing tools that run in the terminal, especially with a TUI which is what we showcase. aider was one of the first we listed as terminal tool of the week (0) last year. (1) We recently featured parllama (2) (not our tool) if you like to run offline and online models in the terminal with a full TUI. (0) https://terminaltrove.com/tool-of-the-week/ (1) https://…

Github Copilot had a tool that runs in the terminal for longer I'm pretty confident. I can activate it with syntax "?? " and it'll respond with a command, explaining the parameters. I've been using it quite a bit, for stuff like ffmpeg or writing bash 1-liners.

yep that was the alias during beta

now its just gh copilot

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/using-github-copilot/usin...

https://github.com/github/gh-copilot

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