Comment by strongpigeon

Comment by strongpigeon 7 hours ago

31 replies

Genuinely excited to try this out. I've started using Codex much more heavily in the past two months and honestly, it's been shockingly good. Not perfect mind you, but it keeps impressing me with what it's able to "get". It often gets stuff wrong, and at times runs with faulty assumptions, but overall it's no worse than having average L3-L4 engs at your disposal.

That being said, the app is stuck at the launch screen, with "Loading projects..." taking forever...

Edit: A lot of links to documentation aren't working yet. E.g.: https://developers.openai.com/codex/guides/environments. My current setup involves having a bunch of different environments in their own VMs using Tart and using VS Code Remote for each of them. I'm not married to that setup, but I'm curious how it handles multiple environments.

Edit 2: Link is working now. Looks like I might have to tweak my setup to have port offsets instead of running VMs.

raw_anon_1111 6 hours ago

I have the $20 a month subscription for ChatGPT and the $200/year subscription to Claude (company reimbursed).

I have yet to hit usage limits with Codex. I continuously reach it with Claude. I use them both the same way - hands on the wheel and very interactive, small changes and tell them both to update a file to keep up with what’s done and what to do as I test.

Codex gets caught in a loop more often trying to fix an issue. I tell it to summarize the issue, what it’s tried and then I throw Claude at it.

Claude can usually fix it. Once it is fixed, I tell Claude to note in the same file and then go back to Codex

  • strongpigeon 5 hours ago

    The trick to reach the usage limit is to run many agents in parallel. Not that it’s an explicit goal of mine but I keep thinking of this blog post [0] and then try to get Codex to do as much for me as possible in parallel

    [0]: http://theoryofconstraints.blogspot.com/2007/06/toc-stories-...

    • raw_anon_1111 5 hours ago

      Telling a bunch of agents to do stuff is like treating it as a senior developer who you trust to take an ambiguous business requirement and letting them use their best judgment and them asking you if they have a question .

      But doing that with AI feels like hiring an outsourcing firm for a project and they come back with an unmaintable mess that’s hard to reason through 5 weeks later.

      I very much micro manage my AI agents and test and validate its output. I treat it like a mid level ticket taker code monkey.

      • bonesss 5 hours ago

        My experience with good outsourcing firms is that they come back with heavily-documented solutions that are 95% of what you actually wanted, leaving you uncomfortably wondering if doing it yourself woulda been better.

        I’m not fully sure what’s worse, something close to garbage with a short shelf life anyone can see, or something so close to usable that it can fully bite me in the ass…

      • strongpigeon 5 hours ago

        I fully believe that if I didn’t review its output and ask it to clean it up it would become unmaintainable real quick. The trick I’ve found though is to be detailed enough in the design from both a technical and non-technical level, sometimes iterating a few time on it with the agent before telling it to go for it (which can easily take 30 minutes)

        That’s how I used to deal with L4, except codex codes much faster (but sometimes in the wrong direction)

  • motbus3 5 hours ago

    I will say that doing small modifications or asking a bunch of stuff fills the context the same in my observations. It depends on your codebase and the rest of stuff you use (sub agents, skills, etc)

    I was once minimising the changes and trying to take the max of it. I did an uncountable numbers of tests and and variations. Didn't really matter much if I told it to do it all or change one line. I feel Claude code tries to fill the context as fast as possible anyway

    I am not sure how worth Claude is right now. I still prefer that rather than codex, but I am starting to feel that's just a bias

    • girvo 4 hours ago

      I don’t think it’s bias: I have no love for any of these tools, but in every evaluation we’ve done at work, Opus 4.5 continually comes out ahead in real world performance

      Codex and Gemini are both good, but slower and less “smart” when it comes to our code base

  • 650REDHAIR 5 hours ago

    I hit the Claude limit within an hour.

    Most of my tokens are used arguing with the hallucinations.

    I’ve given up on it.

    • hnsr 4 hours ago

      Do you use Claude Code, or do you use the models from some other tool?

      I find it quite hard to hit the limits with Claude Code, but I have several colleagues complaining a lot about hitting limits and they use Cursor. Recently they also seem to be dealing with poor results (context rot?) a lot, which I haven't really encountered yet.

      I wonder if Claude Code is doing something smart/special

    • TuxSH 4 hours ago

      In my case I've had it (Opus Thinking in CC) hit 80% of the 5-hour limit and 100% of the context window with one single tricky prompt, only to end up with worthless output.

      Codex at least 'knows' to give up in half the time and 1/10th of the limits when that happens.

    • theshrike79 3 hours ago

      I don't want to be That Guy, but if you're "arguing with hallucinations" with an AI Agent in 2026 you're either holding it wrong or you're working on something highly nonstandard.

  • petesergeant 5 hours ago

    I have a found Codex to be an exceptional code-reviewer of Claude's work.

dkundel 7 hours ago

Hey thank you for calling out the broken link. That should be fixed now. Will make sure to track down the other broken links. We'll track down why loading is taking a while for you. Should definitely be snappier.

  • wahnfrieden 6 hours ago

    Is this the only announcement for Apple platform devs?

    I thought Codex team tweeted about something coming for Xcode users - but maybe it just meant devs who are Apple users, not devs working on Apple platform apps...

SunshineTheCat 7 hours ago

Same here. From my experience, codex usually knocks backend/highly "logical?" tasks out of the park while fairly basic front-end/UI tasks it stumbles over at times.

But overall it does seem to be consistently improving. Looking to see how this makes it easier to work with.

xiphias2 7 hours ago

Cool, looks like I'll stay on Cursor. All alternatives come out buggy, they care a lot about developer experience.

BTW OpenAI should think a bit about polishing their main apps instead of trying to come out with new ones while the originals are still buggy.

  • embirico 6 hours ago

    (I work on Codex) One detail you might appreciate is that we built the app with a ton of code sharing with the CLI (as core agent harness) and the VSCode extension (UI layer), so that as we improve any of those, we polish them all.

    • theLiminator 6 hours ago

      Any chance you'll enable remote development on a self-hosted machine with this app?

      Ie. I think the codex webapp on a self-hosted machine would be great. This is impotant when you need a beefier machine (with potentially a GPU).

      • vardalab 2 hours ago

        This should be table stakes by now. That's the beauty of these cli tools and how they scale so well.

      • naiv 5 hours ago

        Working remotely with the app would truly be great

    • thefounder 6 hours ago

      Any reason to switch from vscode with codex to this app? To me it looks like this app is more for non-developers but maybe I’m missing something

      • romainhuet 6 hours ago

        Good question! VS Code is still a great place for deep, hands-on coding with the Codex IDE extension.

        We built the Codex app to make it easier to run and supervise multiple agents across projects, let longer-running tasks execute in parallel, and keep a higher-level view of what’s happening. Would love to hear your feedback!

        • naiv 5 hours ago

          ok , 'projects' but this would make a lot more sense if we could connect remotely to the projects which works without a problem using the IDE plugin, so right now I don't see any advantage of using this

    • tomjen3 5 hours ago

      Awesome. Any chance we will see a phone app?

      I know coding on a phone sounds stupid, but with an agent it’s mostly approvals and small comments.

      • strongpigeon 5 hours ago

        The ChatGPT app on iOS has a Codex page, though it only seems to be for the "cloud" version.