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

Posted by mfiguiere 4/16/2025

OpenAI Codex CLI: Lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal(github.com)

516 points | 289 commentspage 3

kristianp 4/17/2025|

I've been using Aider, it was irritating to use (couldn't supply changes in the diff format) until I switched away from chatgpt-4o to Claude 3.7 and then Gemini 2.5. This is admittedly for a small project. Gpt 4.1 should do better with the diff format so I will give it a go.

usecodenaija 4/17/2025||

So, OpenAI’s Codex CLI is Claude Code, but worse?

Cursor-Agent-Tools > Claude Code > Codex CLI

https://pypi.org/project/cursor-agent-tools/

yetanotherjosh 4/22/2025||

Astroturfing alert. This comment author is also the author of cursor-agent-tools.

submeta 4/17/2025|||

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

usecodenaija 4/18/2025||

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

oulipo 4/17/2025|||

I've been quite unimpressed by Codex for now... even the quality of the code is worse than Claude for me

killerstorm 4/17/2025||

This tool has nothing to do with Cursor.

Very misleading to use popular brand like that, possible scam.

usecodenaija 4/17/2025||

Maybe read the docs before replying:

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

killerstorm 4/20/2025||

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.

p3rry 4/17/2025||

I had built this few weeks back on same thought https://github.com/shubhamparamhans/Associate-AI-EM/

sim7c00 4/17/2025||

notes "Zero setup — bring your OpenAI API key and it just works!"

requires NPM >.>

jackchina 4/17/2025||

Claude Code has outstanding performance in code understanding and web page generation stability, thanks to its deep context modeling and architecture-aware mechanism, especially when dealing with legacy systems, it can accurately restore component relationships. Although Codex CLI (o4-mini) is open source and responsive, its hallucination problems in complex architectures may be related to the compression strategy of the sparse expert hybrid architecture and the training goal of prioritizing generation speed. OpenAI is optimizing Codex CLI by integrating the context control capabilities of Windsurf IDE, and plans to introduce a hybrid inference pipeline in the o3-pro version to reduce the hallucination rate.

dgunay 4/17/2025||

This is a decent start. The sandboxing functionality is a really cool idea but can run into problems (e.g. with Go build cache being outside of the repository).

jamesy0ung 4/17/2025||

It's a real shame sandbox-exec is deprecated.

romanovcode 4/17/2025||

Tried it out on a relatively large Angular project.

> explain this codebase to me

> doing things and thinking for about 3 minutes

> error: rate_limit_exceeded

Yeah, not the best experience.

zora_goron 4/16/2025||

Anyone have any anecdotes on how expensive this is to operate, ie compared to performing the same task via Claude Code?

mrcwinn 4/16/2025|

A one line change, that took a decent amount of reasoning to get to for a large codebase, cost $3.57 just now. I used the o3 model. The quality and the reasoning was excellent. Cheaper than an engineer.

john2x 4/17/2025||

Technically it’s more expensive, because it cost engineer + $3.57 :)

mcbuilder 4/16/2025|

So a crappy version of aider?

dgunay 4/17/2025||

Aider doesn't have a more agentic/full-auto mode (at least not yet, there's a promising PR for this in review).

There may or may not also be some finessing necessary in the prompting and feedback loop regardless of model, which some tools may do better than others.

inciampati 4/17/2025||

The AI companies don't understand that they're the commodity. The real tools are the open source glue (today: aider) that bring the models into conversation with data and meaningmakers like ourselves.

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