Comment by postalcoder
19 hours ago
The best part about this blog post is that none of it is a surprise – Codex CLI is open source. It's nice to be able to go through the internals without having to reverse engineer it.
Their communication is exceptional, too. Eric Traut (of Pyright fame) is all over the issues and PRs.
This came as a big surprise to me last year. I remember they announced that Codex CLI is opensource, and the codex-rs [0] from TypeScript to Rust, with the entire CLI now open source. This is a big deal and very useful for anyone wanting to learn how coding agents work, especially coming from a major lab like OpenAI. I've also contributed some improvements to their CLI a while ago and have been following their releases and PRs to broaden my knowledge.
[0] https://github.com/openai/codex/tree/main/codex-rs
I know very little about typescript and even less about rust. Am I getting the rust version of codex when I do `npm i -g @openai/codex`?
A stand alone rust binary would be nicer than installing node.
yes [0]
> The Rust implementation is now the maintained Codex CLI and serves as the default experience
[0] https://github.com/openai/codex/tree/main/codex-rs#whats-new...
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For some reason a lot of people are unaware that Claude Code is proprietary.
Probably because it doesn’t matter most of the time?
Same. If you're already using a proprietary model might as well just double down
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If the software is, say, Audacity, who's target market isn't specifically software developers, sure, but seeing as how Claude code's target market has a lot of people who can read code and write software (some of them for a living!) it becomes material. Especially when CC has numerous bugs that have gone unaddressed for months that people in their target market could fix. I mean, I have my own beliefs as to why they haven't opened it, but at the same time, it's frustrating hitting the same bugs day after day.
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Can't really fault them when this exists:
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code
What even is this repo? Its very deceptive
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By the way, I reversed engineered the Claude Code binary and started sharing different code snippets (on twitter/bluesky/mastadon/threads). There's a lot of code there, so I'm looking for requests in terms of what part of the code to share and analyze what it's doing. One of the requests I got was about the LSP functionality in CC. Anything else you would find interesting to explore there?
I'll post the whole thing in a Github repo too at some point, but it's taking a while to prettify the code, so it looks more natural :-)
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That must be the worst repo I have ever seen.
Using GitHub as an issue tracker for proprietary software should be prohibited. Not that it would, these days.
Codeberg at least has some integrity around such things.
I frankly don't understand why they keep CC proprietary. Feels to me that the key part is the model, not the harness, and they should make the harness public so the public can contribute.
Yeah this has always seemed very silly. It is trivial to use claude code to reverse engineer itself.
looks like it's trivial to you because I don't know how to
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That is against ToS and could get you banned.
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At this point I just assume Claude Code isn't OSS out of embarrassment for how poor the code actually is. I've got a $200/mo claude subscription I'm about to cancel out of frustration with just how consistently broken, slow, and annoying to use the claude CLI is.
> how poor the code actually is.
Very probably. Apparently, it's literally implemented with a React->Text pipeline and it was so badly implemented that they were having problems with the garbage collector executing too frequently.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46699072#46701013
OpenCode is amazing, though.
I switched to Opencode a few weeks ago. What a pleasant experience. I can finally resume subagents (which has been Broken in CC for weeks), copy the source of the Assistant's output (even over SSH), have different main agents, have subagents call subagents,... Beautiful.
Especially that RCE!
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Interesting. Have you tested other LLMs or CLIs as a comparison? Curious which one you’re finding more reliable than Opus 4.5 through Claude Code.
Codex is quite a bit better in terms of code quality and usability. My only frustration is that it's a lot less interactive than Claude. On the plus side, I can also trust it to go off and implement a deep complicated feature without a lot of input from me.
Yeah same with Claude Code pretty much and most people don’t realize some people use Windows.
I'm almost certain their code is a dumpster fire.
As for your 200$/mo sub. Dont buy it. If you read the fine print, their 20x usage is _per 5h session_, not overall usage.
Take 2x 100$ if you're hitting the limit.
Anthropic/Claude's entire UX is the worst among the bunch
What’s the best?
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I thought Eric Traut was famous for his pioneering work in virtualization, TIL he has Pyright fame too !
Is it just a frontend CLI calling remote external logic for the bulk of operations, or does it come with everything needed to run lovely offline? Does it provide weights under FLOW license? Does it document the whole build process and how to redo and go further on your own?
I appreciate the sentiment but I’m giving OpenAI 0 credit for anything open source, given their founding charter and how readily it was abandoned when it became clear the work could be financially exploited.
> when it became clear the work could be financially exploited
That is not the obvious reason for the change. Training models got a lot more expensive than anyone thought it would.
You can of course always cast shade on people's true motivations and intentions, but there is a plain truth here that is simply silly to ignore.
Training "frontier" open LLMs seems to be exactly possible when a) you are Meta, have substantial revenue from other sources and simply are okay with burning your cash reserves to try to make something happen and b) you copy and distill from the existing models.
I agree that openAI should be held with a certain degree of contempt, but refusing to acknowledge anything positive they do is an interesting perspective. Why insist on a one dimensional view? It’s like a fraudster giving to charity, they can be praiseworthy in some respect while being overall contemptible, no?
Why even acknowledge them in any regard? Put trash where it belongs.
By this measure, they shouldn’t even try to do good things in small pockets and probably should just optimize for profits!
Fortunately, many other people can deal with nuance.