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The Codex App

openai.com

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Re: The Codex App

#311

Post by piskov »

mellosouls wrote: post #171
mellosouls wrote: post #44

Mac only. Again . Apple is great but this is OpenAI devs showing their disconnect from the mainstream. Its complacent at best, contemptuous at worst. SamA or somebody really needs to give the product managers here a kick up the arse.

Kudos to the OpenAI reps for responding to my comment and doing so politely. My ire was provoked by this following on from the Windows ChatGPT app that was just a container for the webpage compared to the earlier bells and whistles Mac app. Perceptions are built on those sorts of decisions.

Because of that windows had thinking budget selectors for months before ios and macos (those got this only last week)

Re: The Codex App

#313

Post by freedomben »

romainhuet wrote: post #62
vzaliva wrote: post #28

How about us, Linux users? This is Mac only. Do they plan to support CLI version with all the features they are adding to desktop app?

Hi! Romain here, I work at OpenAI. The team actually built the Codex app in Electron so we can support both Windows and Linux very soon. Stay tuned!

Nice, thank you for sharing!

Re: The Codex App

#314

Post by _23sd »

lvl155 wrote: post #230
_23sd wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean if they were targeting "software engineers" in general then Windows would be the obvious choice in 2026 as much as in 2006. But these early releases are all about the SF bubble where Mac is very much dominant.

Really? I frankly don’t know anyone who’s not on Linux. If you do any AI/ML you basically find yourself on a Linux box eventually. Perhaps I live in a bubble.

Surely it varies a lot and everyone is in an industry bubble to some extent, but from my experience in some non-tech industries (healthcare, manufacturing), Linux workstations were nonexistent and working with the Linux servers was more a sign of an ops role. People who wrote code for a living didn't touch them directly. Last StackOverflow survey [1] puts it at something like 50% use Windows at work, 30% Mac, 20-40% Linux (breakdown of WSL and Ubuntu as categories seems confusing, maybe the raw data is better).

[1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology/#1-computer-...

Re: The Codex App

#315

Post by woah »

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.

The various GPU-accelerated terminal projects always make me chuckle

Re: The Codex App

#316

Post by AstroBen »

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…

What features are they missing that a native app would allow for?

No-one outside of a small sliver of the tech community cares if an app is built with web tech

Electron also opens up easier porting to Linux which almost certainly wouldn't happen if companies insist on native only

Re: The Codex App

#317

Post by markbao »

pama wrote: post #251
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…

My main take is exactly the opposite. Why not build everything with a simple text interface (shell command) so the models learn to use these tools natively in pretraining. Even TUI like codex-cli or claude code are needless abstractions for such use cases and make full automation hard. You could add as many observability or input layers for humans as you want but the core should be simple calls that are saved in hist…

TUI is easy to train on, but hard to use for users. Part of the reason it’s easier to have LLMs use a bunch of Unix tools for us is that their text interface is tedious and hard to remember. If you’re a top 5% expert in those tools it doesn’t matter as much I guess but most people aren’t.

Even a full-featured TUI like Claude Code is highly limited compared to a visual UI. Conversation branching, selectively applying edits, flipping between files, all are things visual UI does fine that are extremely tedious in TUI.

Overall it comes down to the fact that people have to use TUI and that’s more important than it being easy to train, and there’s a reason we use websites and not terminals for rich applications these days.

Re: The Codex App

#318

Post by inquirerGeneral »

adastra22 wrote: post #296
jarek-foksa wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have complained about literally every Electron based app I have ever used. How would you know there are no complaints?

[dead]

Re: The Codex App

#320

Post by nxobject »

dcre wrote: post #96
nr378 wrote: post #89

Looks like another Claude App/Cowork-type competitor with slightly different tradeoffs (Cowork just calls Claude Code in a VM, this just calls Codex CLI with OS sandboxing). Here's the Codex tech stack in case anyone was interested like me. Framework: Electron 40.0.0 Frontend: - React 19.2.0 - Jotai (state management) - TanStack React Form - Vite (bundler) - TypeScript Backend/Main Process: - Node.js - better-sqlite3…

The use of the name Codex and the focus on diffs and worktrees suggests this is still more dev-focused than Cowork.

It's a smart move – while Codex has the same aspirations, limiting it to savvy power users will likely lead to better feedback, and less catastrophic misuse.
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