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

There's a lot of tools now with a similar feature set. IMO, the main value prop an official OpenAI client could provide would be to share ChatGPT's free tier vs. requiring an API key. They probably couldn't open-source it then, but it'd still be more valuable to me than the alternatives.

Coding agents use extreme numbers of tokens, you’d be getting rate limited effectively immediately.

A typical small-medium PR with Claude Code for me is ~$10-15 of API credits.

Why would they? They want to compete with claude code and that's not possible on a free tier.

I didn't know this, thank you for the anecdata! Do you think it'd be more reasonable to generalize my suggestion to "This CLI should be included as part of ChatGPT's pricing"?

Too expensive for me to use for fun. Cheap enough to put me out of a job. Great. Love it. So excited. Doesn't make me want to go full Into The Wild at all.

I've ended up with $5K+ in a month using sonnet 3.7, had to dial it back.

I'm much happier with gemini 2.5 pro right now for high performance at a much more reasonable cost (primarily using with RA.Aid, but I've tried it with Windsurf, cline, and roo.)

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

Hoooly hell. I swear the AI coding products are basically slot machines.

Could be reasonable for the $200/month sub maybe?

But then again, $200 upfront is a much tougher sell than $15 dollars per PR.

I don’t think this is at the level of putting folks out of a job yet, frankly. It’s fine for straightforward changes, but more complex stuff, like concurrency, I still end up doing by hand.

And even for the straightforward stuff, I generally have a mental model of the changes required and give it a high level list of files/code to change, which it then follows.

Maybe the increase in productivity will reduce pressure to hire? We’ll see.

Exactly. Just like Michelin the tire company created Michelin star restaurants list to make people drive and use more tires

Just try the most superior model deep-seek

Trust me bro, you don't need RAG, just stuff your entire codebase into the prompt (also we charge per input token teehee)

Or the people using them are literally clueless.

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.