Comment by fcap

Hey, that is a very good question, I have answered that before. I hope you don't mind, if I simply copy paste my previous answer:

Technically you can use the original Codex CLI with a local LLM - if your inference provider implements the OpenAI Chat Completions API, with function calling, etc. included.

But based on what I had in mind - the idea that small models can be really useful if optimized for very specific use cases - I figured the current architecture of Codex CLI wasn't the best fit for that. So instead of forking it, I started from scratch.

Here's the rough thinking behind it:

   1. You still have to manually set up and run your own inference server (e.g., with ollama, lmstudio, vllm, etc.).
   2. You need to ensure that the model you choose works well with Codex's pre-defined prompt setup and configuration.
   3. Prompting patterns for small open-source models (like phi-4-mini) often need to be very different - they don't generalize as well.
   4. The function calling format (or structured output) might not even be supported by your local inference provider.

Codex CLI's implementation and prompts seem tailored for a specific class of hosted, large-scale models (e.g. GPT, Gemini, Grok). But if you want to get good results with small, local models, everything - prompting, reasoning chains, output structure - often needs to be different. So I built this with a few assumptions in mind:

   - Write the tool specifically to run _locally_ out of the box, no inference API server required.
   - Use model directly (currently for phi-4-mini via llama-cpp-python).
   - Optimize the prompt and execution logic _per model_ to get the best performance.

Instead of forcing small models into a system meant for large, general-purpose APIs, I wanted to explore a local-first, model-specific alternative that's easy to install and extend — and free to run.