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

Fingers crossed for this to work well! Claude Code is pretty excellent.

I’m actually legitimately surprised how good it is, since other coding agents I’ve used before have mostly been a letdown, which made me only use Claude in direct change prompting with Zed (“implement xyz here”, “rewrite this function with abc”, etc), so very hands-on.

So I’ve went into trying out Claude Code rather pessimistically, and now I’m using it all the time! Sure, it ends up costing a bunch, but it’s easy to justify $15 for a prompting session if the end result is a mostly complete PR, done much faster.

All that is to say - competition is good, fingers crossed for codex!

Fingers crossed for what?

too expensive. I cant understand why everyone is into claude code vs using claude in cursor or windsurf.

I think it depends a lot on how you value your time. I'm personally willing to spend hundreds or thousands per month happily if it saves me enough hours. I'd estimate that if I were to do consulting, I'd likely be charging in the $150-250 per hour range, so by my math, it's pretty easy to justify any tools that save me even a few hours per month.

Anecdotally, Claude code performs much better than Claude within Cursor. Not sure if it’s a system prompt thing or if I’ve just convinced myself of it because the aesthetic is so much better, but either way the end result feels better to me.

You get the same results for cheaper by using a different tool (Windsurf's better imho).

ok but in what way a terminal is a bettter UI than an IDE? I am trying all of them on a weekly basis and windsurf UX seems miles ahead/ more efficient than a terminal. that is also what OAI believes or else they wouldnt try to buy it

Claude Code has been able to produce results equivalent to a junior engineer. I spent about $300 API credits in a month but got the value out of it far surpassing that.

That may be, but I think tools with a fixed monthly fee are always going to have an incentive to reduce their own costs on the backend and route you toward less capable models, cut down context size, produce less output, stop before the task is truly finished, etc.

Given how much time these models can save me, I'd rather optimize for capability and just accept whatever the price is as a cost of doing business. (Within reason I guess—I probably wouldn't go beyond $2-3k per month at this point, unless there was very clear ROI on that spend.)

Also, it's not only about saving time. More powerful AI tools allow me to build things it would otherwise be impossible to build... that's just as important as the time/cost equation.

I've spent more than 40 hours/week and close to $1,000 in API credits using these tools. For me the ranking goes. But, we all will have difference experiences.

1. Claude Code 2. Cursor 3. Cline. 4. Windsurf

Not a better UI at all but seems like they're able to then focus on what matters in these early stages and that's quality of output.

One thing that is clearly better in the terminal is secrets management/environment variables.

It's also much easier to control execution in a structured and reliable way in the terminal. Here's an automated debugging use case, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-_76U_nK0Y

How do you price this in? If you’re charging by the hour, paying out of pocket to reduce your hours seems self-defeating unless you raise your rates enough to cover both the costs and the lost hours. I can’t imagine too many clients would accept “I’m very expensive per hour because I’m fast, because I get AI to do most of it.”

My choice conspiracy is resource allocation and playing favorites.

After I have a session going on, the Claude Code terminal app has been given the permission to do everything I want it to. Then I just let it burn itself out doing whatever. It's a background task. That's the big advantage. I don't baby sit it.

I tried switching from Claude Code to both Cursor and Windsurf. Neither of the latter IDEs fully support MCP implementations (missing basic things like tool definitions and other vital features last time I tried) and both have been riddled with their own agentic flow issues (cursor going down for a week a bit ago, windsurf requiring paid upgrades to "get around" bugs, etc).

This is all ignoring the controversies that pop up around e.g. Cursor seemingly every week. As an IDE, they're both getting there -- but I have objectively better results in Claude Code.

If you have AWS credits...

export CLAUDE_CODE_USE_BEDROCK=1

export ANTHROPIC_MODEL=us.anthropic.claude-3-7-sonnet-20250219-v1:0

export ANTHROPIC_API_TYPE=bedrock

Claude Code has a closed license https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/LICENSE....

There is fork named Anon Kode https://github.com/dnakov/anon-kode which can use more models and non-Anthropic ones. But the license is unclear for it.

It's interesting to see codex to be Apache License. Maybe somebody extends it to be usable with competing models.

Are you still working 40 hours a week? If so, what's the difference?

I like the terminal UX because VS Code (and any forks of it) is not my editor of choice, and swapping around to use an editor just for AI coding is annoying (I was doing that with the Zed Assistant a lot).

With Claude Code I can stay in Goland, and have Claude Code in the terminal.

and where are these export used? Ader?

Is this for Claude Code?

In terms of terminal-based and open-source, I think aider is the most popular one.

yes! It's great! I like it!

But it has one downside: It's not so good on unknown big complex code bases where you don't know how it's structured. I wished they (or somebody else) would add an AI or an automation to add files dynamically or in a smart way when you don't know the codebase structure (with the expense of burning more tokens).

I'm thinking Codex (have not checked it yet), Claude Code, Anon Kode and all the AI editors/plugins doing a better job there (and potentially burning more tokens).

But that's the only downside I can think of about aider.

Why is using cursor with sonnet cheaper than using claude code?

I started using claude code everyday. It’s kinda expensive and hallucinates a ton (tho with custom prompt i’ve mostly tamed it).

Hope more competition can bring price down.

probably because cursor is betting on many paying people not using their tool to full extend. Like people paying on their gym memberships but not going to the gym.

Or they are burning VC money.

I've read anecdotal evidence that it uses tokens more sparingly than Claude Code - supported by the, likewise anecdotal, evidence that Claude Code is more effective in practice. However, that would be reasonable, as basically 1-3 sessions with Claude Code cost what a whole month of Cursor costs.

I don’t - if I can use a tool that saves me 10 hours a week, that’s 10 hours more beach time for me.

Yep

You could also try JetBrains' Junie and Sourcegraph Cody.

As the OP said, he can now tackle more complex tasks:

> More powerful AI tools allow me to build things it would otherwise be impossible to build...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43709775

Accomplishing more in that 40 hours?

I was under the impression Aider did exactly what you're describing using it's repo map feature.

$1000 over how many 40 hour weeks?

that's what my Ramp card is for.

seriously though, anything that makes me smarter and more productive has a threshold in the thousands-of-dollars range, not hundreds

Not really, repo map only gives LLMs an overview of the codebase, but aider doesn't automatically bring files into the context - you have to explicitly add the files you wish for it to see in their entirety to the context. Claude Code/Codex and most other tools do this automatically, that's why they're much more autonomous.

I was very unimpressed with their original AI assistance implementation, so I’m gonna wait to see some user stories / reviews before I put my time into that, and so far I have seen effectively no mention of Junie anywhere.

Moreover, there’s no way to bring your own key, with the highest subscription tier being $20 per month flat it seems, which is the cost of just 1-3 sessions with Claude Code. Thus, without evidence to the contrary, I’m not holding my breath for now.

Or, increasingly, how the company values your time. If Claude Code can make a $100K/year dev 10% more productive, it's worth it to the employer to pay anything under $1600/month for it (assuming fully loaded cost of the employee to the business is twice salary).

Aider regularly asks me the authorization to access files that I didn't explicitly add.

If it's a fork of the proprietary code, the license is pretty clear, it's violating copyright.

Now whether or not anthropic care enough to enforce their license is separate issue, but it seems unwise to make much of an investment in it.

Seconded. I was surprised by how good Claude Code is, even for less mainstream languages (Clojure). I am happy there is competition!

Productivity and business value are not linearly related. It could provide 0 business value to make someone 10% more productive.

They call it a "fork" but it doesn't share any code. It's from scratch afaik

I was thinking of productivity as generation of business value rather than something less correlated like lines of code produced. But sure, it's probably more accurate to directly say "business value".

And being paid more? Most salaried employees would not be.

windsurf also have plugins to jetbrains - they rebranded the whole company from codeium to windsurf and their jetbrains plugin also support cascade.

> if it saves me enough hours

You're being paid to type? I want your job.

It's literally the same model. I can build more complex stuff in windsurf as the IDE is better than Cline/Roocode integration in vscode. It's still the same model under the hood. Sonnet 202500219

I mean, you pour money down the drain if you think it's helping, have at it :P

How you can place windsuf in number 4 is interesting, especially given it's very similar to cursor but is leaner on the UI and Cline is a vs-code plugin that very verbose.

I'll stick with Windsurf, especially given their upcoming announcement.

(This happens when the LLM mentions them.)

I didn't like not seeing the reasoning of the models

It's the same model but not necessarily the same context. Like he said, those tools try to be very 'smart' with context to save costs.

You're not actually getting all the files you add in the context window, you're getting a RAG'd version of it, which is generally much worse if the un-RAG'd code is still within the effective context limit.

Honesty not sure quite a few. 6-8 or so?

I care a lot less about UI and more about quality of output. Windsurf has had some of the lowest quality outputs for me.

One has the incentive to burn through as much tokens and the other has an incentive to use as little as possible

Great point.