1. Much better multi-agent orchestration. The app supervises many agents, with different project views and built-in git worktrees, so agents can work on isolated copies of the same repo. It's easy to jump between tasks and see changes. I recall OpenAI wrote that CLI was not designed around this style of work.

2. The app combines multiple terminals, file previews, PR-review workflows, SSH connections, an integrated browser, and page annotations. For front-end stuff, Codex can run the app in Codex for mockups/prototypes, then iterate inside the app. IMHO I think this is a much faster, more intuitive flow.

3. For long-running and recurring agent workflows, I think they're much easier to manage in the app. You get automations, review queues, persistent conversation context, future schedules, and auto resume for longer running tasks. E.g. CI failure summaries, issue triage, and release briefs.

You can do some of the above, to some degree, with varying levels of success in the CLI, but I think it's miles ahead in the app.

However, from the screenshots and description, I expect that you would have these advantages:

- History. Currently, if you type into the CLI (TUI) your intention and requests are captured in some transcripts, but not in conversational turns. If you want the history of what you typed into the cli/tui you would have to datamine it from transcripts. By contrast, on the screenshots you can see it is a simple conversation that's saved and easy to return to.

- Multiplatform. As per the announcement "Use Codex across ChatGPT, your editor, and the terminal", meaning that you could open the ChatGPT app on your phone and continue to interact with this. While this might not matter to you if you exclusively code while sitting in front of your computer, still, it helps you be able to stay on top of things if you are on mobile.

- Background tasks and autonomous work. It says you can schedule it to do things in the background (issue triage, alert monitoring). At the moment, it would only do this if you've asked either codex or another agent to build a harness for it that does so. (i.e. you could ask Claude to build a harness that calls Codex on some schedule or interval.)

These all seem pretty good and I look forward to starting to use it once it's been more battle-tested.

[1] notably, on the Anthropic side the Opus 5 regressions - I had to downgrade to Opus 4.8 as I found Opus 5 was unreliable. I currently use Opus 4.8 and Codex Sol 5.6.

A VM would be even better, but people could presumably run this in one if we manage to convince them of higher sandboxing in general ?

Even for developers working on Linux, you'll be surprised how many have never run a docker command in their life.

It created 2 new users and then assigned new NTFS permissions for every single file under my user directory to them. This of course wrecked havoc, ssh refused to work, several applications refusing to start and a ton of permission errors. It did this without even a warning in the background and it also does not undo any of it when you uninstall it.

It took around 3 hours to fix it by updating ~10 million NTFS permissions for every single file under my user directory.

Tabs for long-running often-compacted sessions is a difference I've noticed in emergent UX.

There's probably more I don't remember too. In my opinion TUI apps are just silly. You don't get any of the advantages of it being just plain text because it's all wrapped in funny Unicode characters and at the same time the GUI capabilities are hamstrung by being text on a grid.

Even with Linux, there are more people -- including many non software engineers -- that are installing Linux on their home computers and may be interested in this.

Bear in mind that HN users don't remotely resemble the general population, or even employees at a tech company -- there are lots of people in finance, business, legal etc who could potentially benefit from this.

It can be controlled from your phone once paired, and it lets you actually see agents that it orchestrates in the threads. Also if you use MCP Apps, it can integrate those into threads.

Also these things are supposed to help you, their idea is that you give it access and it's helpful proportional to the access you give it. A separate user works for some, especially when vibecoding, you whitelist accesses. But for general computer usage, an assistant that has access to your files and acts as a sort of OS needs your user access.

Don't they have agent swarms with infinite tokens?

But I wouldn't know first-hand.

It is a marketing expense. We are talking about it. Surely the token cost was worthwhile on that basis alone. Students will likely get some usage out of it, too. But paying a human to do this port would have been an insane thing to do two years ago. I’d be surprised if they have more than 1000 MAUs for this client by the end of the year.

Seems pretty solid for Mac, but idk about Windows and Linux.

https://openai.com/index/building-chatgpt-atlas/

And I experimented with gpui from zed, that was even harder to work with.

Of course they could chase performance, but ultimately time to market is the #1 factor right now, and coding agents still aren't good enough to just immediately realize an entire GPUI app from scratch with nothing more than a figma design. Still requires a ton of oversight.

- nicer diff rendering, and directly mentioning parts of a diff

- Latex rendering (pretty annoying in the CLI, you have to actively tell Codex it's running in a terminal and replace Latex syntax with UTF-8 glyphs)

All the stuff people are hacking into TUIs is honestly a bit silly, they're actually very inefficient for high fidelity UIs. Having worked in it and on it before while @ GOOG, the actual renderer in Chromium is an optimized thing of beauty. It really makes sense to leverage it. Appropriately.

But all of the above could (should) be done as a locally hosted web page via the existing codex CLI launching a local web server... rather than shipping an electron binary with its own entire fork of Chromium.

These apps stands as last defense between users and legitimate owners of compute resources that is electron and pals.

Surely they can just vibe is down to a reasonable footprint, right? Right?

How magnanimous: they make the effort to support the OS their entire company is based on? It's not just for training the model and hosting them: it's also to run them, where they constantly use Linux to do their thing.

Without Linux, there's no OpenAI.

So I take it the Linux community should be so grateful that OpenAI supports Linux, right?

My real problem with Electron is the multi-process render architecture, which I think is pointless for the "just a GUI toolkit" case of rendering only trusted content. I'm 100% fine with Slack, Spotify, whatever using Electron as their choice of GUI toolkits. These come and go. I'm miffed that they use multiple processes when there's no real security boundary between them just because there is a security boundary in the homologous scenario on the web.