Codex App Doesn't Suck
We are slowly letting go of the old new way.
Welcome back to the cartine.
Hope you enjoyed my latest exposition on how WE ARE ALL TOTALLY FUCKED.
I’m sure you’ve all heard by now that OpenAI has released a “Codex App” that is not a tui cli. You probably have a job and intuitively know that 99.9934% of these things are just tiny cogs in the hype machine. No worries, the cartine’s got your back. I downloaded it, banged away at it in anger, and now you can get the gist in < 5 minutes. ish.
The Problem With Everything
You know the drill by now. The more comfortable you get with the end of writing code, the more agent terminals you have fired up simultaneously in your terminal/tmux/etc.
You’ve probably got VSCode open; maybe a few instances if you’re a multi-clone kinda human. Obviously 112 browser tabs. It’s chaos and you love it because it feels right for the times.
Is that actually a problem? Prolly not but hey it’s a shit ton of cognitive load. If you’re an old fuck like me with zero short-term memory (ah…sweet university times) it’s not super efficient.
What Codex Gets Right
Everything In One Place
All your conversations are filed on the left. It feels *compact* without being cramped. You can actually see what you’re working on (and what you’ve worked on) without a second screen and a degree in window management.
But seriously, get a second screen.
Side-Pane Diff View (AKA: Stop Gaslighting Me You Shitbag Agent)
You get enough terminal sessions going, you will default to blind trust. It’s just such a pain to stay on top of the code changes AND go fast at the same time, I kind of just gave up. And really, it was smarter to just do that all along.
But at least once a day I come across something I just have to eyeball. So I do keep several VSCode windows open.
Aren’t VSCode Plugins The Same But Better?
I mean that’s kind of a dumb question, like asking why Claude Code is ELECTROSHOCKING the coding world right now. The plugin approach is SUPER inefficient. Your entire attention bandwidth is wasted on so much unimportant context. You’re not going to open files and edit them. You’re not manually running tests. You’re doing 6+ execution flows simultaneously. It’s why tuis have exploded onto the scene.
So no, plugins suck. With the Codex App’s approach, I can more easily see when the agent is plowing down the wrong path (typically massively refactoring an orphaned app with an eerily similar name to the one I’m actually caring about).
It seems basic but it’s a subtle shift from yet-another-vscode-plugin - in combination with the compact thread navigation it’s much more efficient and hence much more powerful.
Some Interesting Settings
Prevent Sleeping While Working
You can queue up a giant refactor and walk away.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve come back to a sleeping laptop and 12 paused Claude sessions. So irritating.
Queuing vs Steering
This is probably my favorite feature, and honestly, it’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder why nobody did it sooner.
How many times have you hammered Escape or Ctrl+C because the agent is steamrolling down the wrong path? Too many. We’ve all been there. The agent misunderstands, starts implementing the wrong thing, and you’re frantically trying to stop it before it’s too late.
With Codex, you just type a nudge and hit **Steer**. The agent course-corrects mid-flight. No stopping, no restarting, no “okay, forget everything I just said.”
You can make Steer the default behavior. I don’t, but you can. (Edit: I have recently made this the default, it’s so much better than queuing.)
I first saw this mindset in Antigravity, where you can comment on plans during the planning phase.
But Antigravity is much slower to incorporate your feedback, and sometimes just ignores it. Or throws it away. It’s not a great vibe. Like how girls treated me in high school.
Zero Config Editor Selection
I’m not really sure how they decide to order the applications - you can configure the “default” but it does not show at the top of the list. But hey, no effort involved so I won’t complain.
Obligatory Built-In Terminal
I seldom if ever use it but it’s nice to know it’s there, quicker than mousing over to the right workspace/window/tab/pane.
Room For Improvement
Tab Proliferation
The Codex App suffers from the same Chrome disease where you end up with 8,929,389,324 tabs open. Instead of tabs though, it’s the threads on the left. If you use the app for a few days you do find yourself digging around to find a thread about something you thought you fixed.
You can archive threads, but there really should be some sort of soft-archiving automation. Like, let me keep 5-6 active conversations visible, and auto-archive the rest. I shouldn’t have to swim through 47 different threads just to find the one where I was debugging that API endpoint last Tuesday.
This seems like something that will naturally improve over time, especially as the engineers who wrote it are certainly using it.
Maybe I’m The One With The Problem
These are some things that might actually be useful to a totally different person with a totally different problem-set.
Setting up a run action seems pretty strange to me - agents are pretty quick to scan your package entrypoint and figure out how to run your app.
Again, if you’re using an agent that doesn’t know how to use npm, like what in the actual fuck. But maybe I’m wrong.
Automations
Yeah I mean, all of these tools seem to have scatterings of skills/agents/flows/mcps and for the most part it’s just like - I don’t get it. I don’t know who they are for and it’s pretty much always faster to just roll your own thing. At least you know it’s being supported and you can tailor it to YOUR use case.
The Verdict
Nice work by the Codex team. They’re pushing the envelope on how we need to change the way we think about agent-assisted software engineering. I would not be surprised at all if Claude Code starts adopting some of these ideas.
That’s all for today! Let me know what you think about the latest changes in the agentic coding scene! cartine out
Thanks for the tips! As a programmer who's getting old by the day, I appreciate it!
First