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.

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.)