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Unrolling the Codex agent loop

openai.com

181–190 of 220 posts

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, this seems promising? https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/9796

OpenAI does not merge feature PRs. But you could try it out in a fork.

What’s the point of having a public GitHub repo with PRs enabled if they will never merge any of them?

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#182
post #168
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. If you're already using a proprietary model might as well just double down

But you don't have to be restricted to one model either? Codex being open source means you can choose to use Claude models, or Gemini, or... It's fair enough to decide you want to just stick with a single provider for both the tool and the models, but surely still better to have an easy change possible even if not expecting to use it.

Codex CLI with Opus, or Gemini CLI with 5.2-codex, because they're open sourced agents? Go ahead if you want but show me where it actually happens with practical values

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the way, I reversed engineered the Claude Code binary and started sharing different code snippets (on twitter/bluesky/mastadon/threads). There's a lot of code there, so I'm looking for requests in terms of what part of the code to share and analyze what it's doing. One of the requests I got was about the LSP functionality in CC. Anything else you would find interesting to explore there? I'll post the whole thing i…

Not only this would violate the ToS, but also a newer native version of Claude Code precompiles most JS source files into the JavaScriptCore's internal bytecode format, so reverse engineering would soon become much more annoying if not harder.

> Not only this would violate the ToS

What specific parts of the ToS does "sharing different code snippets" violate? Not that I don't believe you, just curious about the specifics as it seems like you've already dug through it.

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#184
post #126

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

This came as a big surprise to me last year. I remember they announced that Codex CLI is opensource, and the codex-rs [0] from TypeScript to Rust, with the entire CLI now open source. This is a big deal and very useful for anyone wanting to learn how coding agents work, especially coming from a major lab like OpenAI. I've also contributed some improvements to their CLI a while ago and have been following their releas…

I know very little about typescript and even less about rust. Am I getting the rust version of codex when I do `npm i -g @openai/codex`?

A stand alone rust binary would be nicer than installing node.

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#185

Codex is extremely bad to the point it is almost useless. Claude Code is very effective. Opus is a solid model and claude very reliably solves problems and is generally efficient and doesn't get stuck in weird loops or go off in insane tangents too often. You can be very very efficient with claude code. Gemini-cli is quite good. If you set `--model gemini-3-pro-preview` it is quite usable, but the flash model is abso…

I have the complete opposite experience. Claude Code is for building small demo apps. Like a 10 line Javascript example. Codex is for building GPU pipelines and emulators.

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#186
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

looks like it's trivial to you because I don't know how to

If only there were some sort of artificial intelligence that could be asked about asking it to look at the minified source code of some application. Sometimes prompt engineering is too ridiculous a term for me to believe there's anything to it, other times it does seem there is something to knowing how to ask the AI juuuust the right questions.

Something I try to explain to people I'm getting up to speed on talking to an LLM is that specific word choices matter. Mostly it matters that you use the right jargon to orient the model. Sure, it's good and getting the semantics of what you said, but if you adjust and use the correct jargon the model gets closer faster. I also explain that they can learn the right jargon from the LLM and that sometimes it's better to start over once you've adjusted you vocabulary.

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#187
post #141

Wow, this part where they describe skills sounds quite odd https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/99f47d6e9a3546c14c43af9... Why wouldnt they just expose the files directly? Having the model ask for them as regular files sounds a bit odd

That's the whole point of skills - they help reduce context window usage by letting the model open only the ones that are relevant.

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#188
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

git worktrees are the canonical solution

worktrees are good but they solve a different problem. Question is, if you have a lot of agent config specific to your work on a project where do you put it? I'm coming around to the idea that checked in causes enough problems it's worth the pain to put it somewhere else.

I have this in my AGENTS.md:

  ## Task Management
  - Use the projects directory for tracking state
  - For code review tasks, do not create a new project
  - Within the `open` subdirectory, make a new folder for your project
  - Record the status of your work and any remaining work items in a `STATUS.md` file
  - Record any important information to remember in `NOTES.md`
  - Include links to MRs in NOTES.md.
  - Make a `worktrees` subdirectory within your project. When modifying a repo, use a `git worktree` within your project's folder. Skip worktrees for read-only tasks
  - Once a project is completed, you may delete all worktrees along with the worktrees subdirectory, and move the project folder to `completed` under a quarter-based time hierarchy, e.g. `completed/YYYY-Qn/project-name`.
More stuff, but that's the basics of folder management, though I haven't hooked it up to our CI to deal with MRs etc, and have never told it that a project is done, so haven't ironed out whether that part of the workflow works well. But it does a good job of taking notes, using project-based state directories for planning, etc. Usually it obeys the worktree thing, but sometimes it forgets after compaction.

I'm dumb with this stuff, but what I've done is set up a folder structure:

  dev/
     dev/repoA
     dev/repoB
     ...
     dev/ai-workflows/
         dev/ai-workflows/projects
And then in dev/AGENTS.md, I say to look at ai-workflows/AGENTS.md, and that's our team sharable instructions (e.g. everything I had above), skills, etc. Then I run it from `dev` so it has access to all repos at once and can make worktrees as needed without asking. In theory, we all should push our project notes so it can have a history of what changed when, etc. In practice, I also haven't been pushing my project directories because they have a lot of experimentation that might just end up as noise.

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#189
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This came as a big surprise to me last year. I remember they announced that Codex CLI is opensource, and the codex-rs [0] from TypeScript to Rust, with the entire CLI now open source. This is a big deal and very useful for anyone wanting to learn how coding agents work, especially coming from a major lab like OpenAI. I've also contributed some improvements to their CLI a while ago and have been following their releas…

I know very little about typescript and even less about rust. Am I getting the rust version of codex when I do `npm i -g @openai/codex`? A stand alone rust binary would be nicer than installing node.

yes [0]

> The Rust implementation is now the maintained Codex CLI and serves as the default experience

[0] https://github.com/openai/codex/tree/main/codex-rs#whats-new...

Re: Unrolling the Codex agent loop

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know very little about typescript and even less about rust. Am I getting the rust version of codex when I do `npm i -g @openai/codex`? A stand alone rust binary would be nicer than installing node.

yes [0] > The Rust implementation is now the maintained Codex CLI and serves as the default experience [0] https://github.com/openai/codex/tree/main/codex-rs#whats-new...

They should switch to a native installer then. Quite confusing
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