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

Sorry for being a grumpy old man, but I don't have npm on my machine and I never will. It's a bit frustrating to see more and more CLI tools depending on it.

What are your concerns?

I asked the same question for Anthropic's version of this. Why is all of this in JS?

What package managers do you use, and what does npm do differently that makes you unwilling to use it?

The entire JS ecosystem.

Judge the packages on their dependencies, not on their package manager.

Same, there are so many options these days for writing CLIs without runtime dependencies. I definitely prefer static binaries.

You could just run it in a Docker container and not think about it much after that. Mount a volume to the container with the directory contents you want to be available for edit by the agent.

https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-cli/scripts/...

Why? I am not the biggest fan of needing a whole VM to run CLI tools either, but it's a low-enough friction experience that I don't particularly care as long as the runtime environment is self-contained.

Tree-sitter related bits probably

if OpenAI had really smart models, they would converted TS/JS apps to Go or Rust apps.

Since they don't, AGI is not here

It might shock you but many of use editors built on browsers for editing source code.

I think the encapsulating comment from a another guy (in Docker or any other of your favorite VM) might be your solution.

JS is web's (and "hip" developer's) python, and in many ways it is better. Also the tooling is getting a lot better (libraries, typescript, bundling, packaging, performance).

One thing I wonder that could be cool: when Bun has sufficient NodeJS compatibility the should ship bun --compile versions so you dont need node/npm on the system.

Then it's arguably a, "why not JS?"

this is a strong HN comment. lots of “putting a stick in my own bicycle wheel” energy

there are tons fascinating things happening in AI and the evolution of programming right now. Claude and OpenAI are at the forefront of these. Not trying it because of npm is a vibe and a half.

> and in many ways it is better

Right but is it worth having to write JS?

/s (kinda)

typescript is a pretty nice language to work with. why not?

tree-sitter is a C library though. Only grammars for each particular lang are defined in javascript.

Yep, this is another one of the reasons why all of these tools are incredibly poor. Like, the other day I was looking at the MCP spec from anthropic and it might be the worst spec that I've ever read in my life. Enshittification at the level of an industry is happening.