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!

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.

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

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.

You could also try JetBrains' Junie and Sourcegraph Cody.