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

These days, I usually paste my entire (or some) repo into gemini and then APPLY changes back into my code using this handy script i wrote: https://github.com/asadm/vibemode

I have tried aider/copilot/continue/etc. But they lack in one way or the other.

Why not just select Gemini Pro 2.5 in Copilot with Edit mode? Virtually unlimited use without extra fees.

Copilot used to be useless, but over the last few months has become quite excellent once edit mode was added.

copilot (and others) try to be too smart and do context reduction (to save their own wallets). I want ENTIRETY of the files I attached to context, not RAG-ed version of it.

This problem is real.

Claude Projects, chatgpt projects, Sourcegraph Cody context building, MCP file systems, all of these are black boxes of what I can only describe as lossy compression of context.

Each is incentivized to deliver ~”pretty good” results at the highest token compression possible.

The best way around this I’ve found is to just own the web clients by including structured, concatenation related files directly in chat contexts.

Self plug but super relevant: I built FileKitty specifically to aid this, which made HN front page and I’ve continued to improve:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40226976

If you can prepare your file system context yourself using any workflow quickly, and pair it with appropriate additional context such as run output, problem description etc, you can get excellent results and you can pound away at OpenAI or Anthropic subscription refining the prompt or updating the file context.

I have been finding myself spending more time putting together prompt complexity for big difficult problems, they would not make sense to solve in the IDE.