Comment by seviu
9 hours ago
To be fair with Codex, you can use any harness you want with it. Access is not gatekeeper by a crappy full of slop electron app.
So just move to PI, or whatever.
Claude on the contrary, forces all plan users to use their horrible app, which, if you ever dared to use cowork, only once, will run a 2GB VM on app start, no f's given. at all.
Not justifying it. But if you use the official Codex app, thats on you. If you use the official Claude app, it's because you are forced to.
Sidenote unrelated to the post: since the Fable thing, and after serious thinking, I moved to open source models. I still have the basic OpenAI sub, but then easy lifting is now done elsewhere.
>if you ever dared to use cowork, only once, will run a 2GB VM on app start, no f's given. at all.
Of all the issues, this seems like the most tame. I mean, there are single Chrome tabs that can use 300MB or even 700MB. A 2GB VM for what is likely isolated local testing of scripts and commands or local lightweight first-level inference to help guide the main harness sounds reasonable.
Not being able to use my own harness on the subscription plan is my biggest gripe with Anthropic/Claude. For what I work on, I still get better results with Opus than I do with GPT5.5-codex, but damn do I hate that I either have to PAYG or I'm stuck using Claude Code.
I haven’t ever tried Cowork, and Claude Desktop shipped a 10 GB VM image on the tiny internal storage of my Macbook.
No way to remove it without hacks like creating an empty, read-only file in its place.
Having this slop installed and automatically updating is a liability.