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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

#281

Post by mgdev »

killerstorm wrote: post #254
mgdev wrote: post #140

Strictly worse than Claude Code presently, but I hope since it's open source that changes quickly.

Given that Claude Code only works with Sonnet 3.7 which has severe limitations, how can it be "strictly worse"?

Whatever Claude Code is doing in the client/prompting is making much better use of 3.7 than any other client I'm using that also uses 3.7. This is especially true for when you bump up against context limits; it can successfully resume with a context reset about 90% of the time. MCP Commander [0] was built almost 100% using Claude Code and pretty light intervention. I immediately felt the difference in friction when using Codex.

I also spent a couple hours picking apart Codex with the goal of adding Sonnet 3.7 support (almost there). The actual agent loop they're using is very simple. Not to say that's a bad thing, but they're offloading all planning and workflow execution to the agent itself. That's probably the right end state to shoot for long-term, but given the current state of these models I've had much better success offloading task tracking to some other thing - even if that thing is just a markdown checklist. (I wrote about my experience [1] building AI Agents last year.)

[0]: https://mcpcommander.com/

[1]: https://mg.dev/lessons-learned-building-ai-agents/

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

#282

Post by aesbetic »

PhilipRoman wrote: post #222
aesbetic wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea that’s not gonna work, you have to export it for it to become part of your shell’s environment and be passed down to subprocesses. You could however wrap the export variable and codex command in a script and just call that. This way the variable would only be part of that script’s environment.

That code example uses the "VAR=VALUE program" syntax, which exports the variable only for that particular process, so it should work ( https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V... )

Yea you’re right. I viewed the comment on mobile where “codex” was wrapped to a new line.

Now I know I should be careful examining code not formatted in a code block.

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

#283

Post by usecodenaija »

submeta wrote: post #240
usecodenaija wrote: post #229

So, OpenAI’s Codex CLI is Claude Code, but worse? Cursor-Agent-Tools > Claude Code > Codex CLI https://pypi.org/project/cursor-agent-tools/

Never heared of Cursor Agent tools. And that is better than Claude Caude according to whom? Genuinely curious.

Are you living in a cave?

anyways, here you go:

Cursor Agent Tools is a Python-based AI agent that replicates Cursor's coding assistant capabilities, enabling function calling, code generation, and intelligent coding assistance with Claude, OpenAI, and locally hosted Ollama models.

https://github.com/civai-technologies/cursor-agent

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

#284

Post by hmottestad »

dingnuts wrote: post #269
artdigital wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Amazon Q is using Amazon Q. You can't change the model, it's calling itself "Q" and it's capped to $20 (Q Developer Pro plan). There is also a free tier available - https://aws.amazon.com/q/developer/ It's very much a "Claude Code" in the sense that you have a "q chat" command line command that can do everything from changing files, running shell commands, reading and researching, etc. So I can say "q chat" and t…

> the entire appeal of Claude Code is that it does everything itself, like figuring out what files to read/change how is this appealing? I think I must be getting old because the idea of letting a language model run wild and run commands on my system -- that's unsanitized input! --horrifies me! What do you mean just let it change random files?? I'm going to have to learn a new trade, IDK

In the OpenAI demo of codex they said that it’s sandboxed.

It only has access to files within the directory it’s run from, even if it calls tools that could theoretically access files anywhere on your system. Also had networking blocked, also in a sandboxes fashion so that things like curl don’t work either.

I wasn’t particularly impressed with my short test of Codex yesterday. Just the fact that it managed to make any decent changes at all was good, but when it messed up the code it took a long time and a lot of tokens to figure out.

I think we need fine tuned models that are good at different tasks. A specific fine tune for fixing syntax errors in Java would be a good start.

In general it also needs to be more proactive in writing and running tests.

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

#285

Post by triyambakam »

ai-christianson wrote: post #256
triyambakam wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the largest I've heard of. Can you share more detail about what you're working on that consumes so many tokens?

It's really easy to get to $100 in a day using sonnet 3.7 or o3 in a coding agent. Do that every day for a month and you're already at $3k/month. It's not hard to get to $5k from there.

Sure but how? Still wondering more specifically what you're doing. And 3-5k is unfortunately my entire month's salary

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

#286

Post by rcarmo »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #120
OJFord wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Check if you accidentally add copyright or license headers. If so, remove them. is interesting

Lol. Stolen code incoming.

I think this is more about hallucinating them.

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

#287

Post by ai-christianson »

triyambakam wrote: post #285
ai-christianson wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really easy to get to $100 in a day using sonnet 3.7 or o3 in a coding agent. Do that every day for a month and you're already at $3k/month. It's not hard to get to $5k from there.

Sure but how? Still wondering more specifically what you're doing. And 3-5k is unfortunately my entire month's salary

I'm developing an open source coding agent (RA.Aid).

I'm using RA.Aid to develop itself (dogfooding,) so I'm constantly running the coding agent.

That cost is my peak cost, not average.

It's easy to scale back costs to 1/10 the cost and still get 90% of the quality. Basically that means using models like gemini 2.5 pro or Deepseek v3 (even cheaper) rather than expensive models like sonnet 3.7 and o3.

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

#288

Post by Aeolun »

Implicated wrote: post #198
Aeolun wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I keep seeing this sentiment and it's wild to me. Sure, it might cost a few dollars here and there. But what I've personally been getting from it, for that cost, is so far away from "expensive" it's laughable. Not only does it do things I don't want to do, in a _super_ efficient manner. It does things I don't know how to do - contextually, within my own project, such that when it's done I _do_ know how to do it. Like…

> It's not going to build your entire app in a single session/context window.

I mean, it was. Right up until it exhausted the context window. Then it suddenly required hand holding.

If I wanted to do that I might as well use Cursor.

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

#289

Post by monsieurbanana »

artdigital wrote: post #252
monsieurbanana wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Upgrade apps in a fraction of the time with the Amazon Q Developer Agent for code transformation (limit 4,000 lines of submitted code per month) 4k loc per month seems terribly low? Any request I make could easily go over that. I feel like I'm completely misunderstanding (their fault though) what they actually meant. Edit: No I don't think I'm misunderstanding, if you want to go over this they direct you to a pay-p…

You are confusing Amazon Q in the editor (like "transform"), and Amazon Q on the CLI. The editor thing has some stuff that costs extra after exceeding the limit, but the CLI tool (that acts similar to Claude Code) is a separate feature that doesn't have this restriction. See https://aws.amazon.com/q/developer/pricing/?p=qdev&z=subnav&... , under "Console" see "Chat". The list is pretty accurate with what's "included"…

I see, thanks. The 4k limit for the gui still seems so low, but I might try the cli sometime.

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

#290

Post by killerstorm »

usecodenaija wrote: post #278
killerstorm wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This tool has nothing to do with Cursor. Very misleading to use popular brand like that, possible scam.

Maybe read the docs before replying: Cursor Agent Tools is a Python-based AI agent that replicates Cursor's coding assistant capabilities, enabling function calling, code generation, and intelligent coding assistance with Claude, OpenAI, and locally hosted Ollama models. https://github.com/civai-technologies/cursor-agent

Being inspired by someone's work DOES NOT give you right to use their trade mark.

It's like making a new operating system and calling it Windows because you "replicate" capabilities of MS Windows. Please read about trademark law.

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