I prefer the CLI myself, but I could imagine:

- nicer diff rendering, and directly mentioning parts of a diff

- Latex rendering (pretty annoying in the CLI, you have to actively tell Codex it's running in a terminal and replace Latex syntax with UTF-8 glyphs)

Probably ecause OpenAI wants training data from PCs of people who are scared of CLIs as well

As others have said, there's all sorts of things an HTML renderer can do better than terminal: proper (not hacked) image handling on both input and output, rendering graphical results, graphs, better code highlighting and diffs, interactive elements, etc. But one thing that strikes me as especially important: a proper accessibility story with magnification, screen reader, TTS etc.

All the stuff people are hacking into TUIs is honestly a bit silly, they're actually very inefficient for high fidelity UIs. Having worked in it and on it before while @ GOOG, the actual renderer in Chromium is an optimized thing of beauty. It really makes sense to leverage it. Appropriately.

But all of the above could (should) be done as a locally hosted web page via the existing codex CLI launching a local web server... rather than shipping an electron binary with its own entire fork of Chromium.

Codex CLI should have been usable for a while now, and you could also sign in to your ChatGPT subscription using Opencode which runs perfectly fine on a Raspberry Pi.

It has a full web browser in it

Because apparently ChatGPT is not able to generate native apps, so desktop developers are safe. /s

Outside Linux, on Windows/Mac, plenty of non developers much prefer the "desktop UI" experience over CLI. Some can't work with CLIs at all.

Even with Linux, there are more people -- including many non software engineers -- that are installing Linux on their home computers and may be interested in this.

Bear in mind that HN users don't remotely resemble the general population, or even employees at a tech company -- there are lots of people in finance, business, legal etc who could potentially benefit from this.

Latex rendering, inline images, inline browser showing what it's clicking on, being able to view a spreadsheet and then select a region to reference in the conversation, clickable links when it references a specific line number with mouse-over previews, interactive inline visualisations.

There's probably more I don't remember too. In my opinion TUI apps are just silly. You don't get any of the advantages of it being just plain text because it's all wrapped in funny Unicode characters and at the same time the GUI capabilities are hamstrung by being text on a grid.

With claude, the difference I noticed is that you can run their cloud enviroment from GUI app, as well as connect to remote machine. Sure, remote connection is nothing interesting, but I'm not aware if claude cli can work with cloud based enviroment. Also claude design is alvaliable on claude gui app. But all of these can be accessed with the browser as well, only the local machine access is something that browser version doesn't have. But for that you can use cli... Really mess of the tools they are shipping. Waiting (not) for Claude/Openai OS

I think one advantage is that you can control it remotely via the chatgpt mobile app. I don't know why they don't allow that for regular codex...

I use it on my macbook. The computer use is pretty sweet.

It can be controlled from your phone once paired, and it lets you actually see agents that it orchestrates in the threads. Also if you use MCP Apps, it can integrate those into threads.

I'm only familiar with the Anthropic equivalent, but the cognitive load is different as opposed to necessarily better or worse. I have friends who prefer mousing around the UI.

Tabs for long-running often-compacted sessions is a difference I've noticed in emergent UX.

Adequate text editing is the main one for me.

I think you can connect your phone and talk to codex remotely, so you can run programming prompts while afk

does the app eat more money that codex cli? I mean is there a difference in cost in asking via the app something vs the cli?