8 ms·

Codex is one of the most infamous examples of slopware. Just having the window unhidden on my mac will cause it to use 100% of the GPU displaying the spinner me

by b--l 3mo ago

Codex is one of the most infamous examples of slopware. Just having the window unhidden on my mac will cause it to use 100% of the GPU displaying the spinner message. THE SPINNER MESSAGE CAUSES 100% GPU USAGE ON AN MBP M5!! So any time you're waiting on the model (which is 90% of the time), your fans will be blasting (careful, don't use it on battery). The issue is on github and close to 6 months old. Probably since the release of vibe coded junk. I would literally fix it myself but it's closed source for whatever reason. There are many discussions about which model is better, or if vibe coding is even possible. I point you to the extent of what one of the most well funded, money flush, well staffed model making companies can do with vibe coding. To me a screwup this bad (where the CEO has already made it clear they're now "focussing on coding") indicates that there's something truly broken in the company. No one on polymarket expects them to have a leading model any time soon for example. It's a tragedy. The world needs competition to anthropic.

l33tman 3mo ago
This was fixed long ago, if I'm thinking of the same bug. It was stuck in an inf loop all the time the codex window was open.
- cncjvu7 3mo ago
  Nah it's still doing weird shit. Uninstalled that crapware last week.
jofzar 3mo ago
> Codex is one of the most infamous examples of slopware Woah, let's not forget Claude code is right there
- mvATM99 3mo ago
  Yeah exactly. I'm not exactly building TUI's every day, but even i felt pain when i read that "small game engine" post
  - TacticalCoder 3mo ago
    > I'm not exactly building TUI's every day, but even i felt pain when i read that "small game engine" post The bigger issue is they where somehow thinking it was "cool" and "advanced" while it's just a kludgy rube-goldbergy monstrous hack. Which is of course only semi-working: to me the model thinking what you see is what it outputs in the TUI is the deal-breaker for me. It's of course not working like that for they're apparently, in their "game engine", converting on the fly a headless browser to approximated characters to display in the terminal. So the model tells you he did output ASCII but people are copy/pasting (because, yes, at times you want to copy/paste) Unicode chars. Plenty of bug reports and pissed users. That's the bigger issue. The biggest issue is those thinking a 10 GB VM required to run a headless Electron browser and then fuxx0ring characters conversion is somehow an achievement.
    - dyarosla 3mo ago
      Whats the small game engine post?
      - gbnwl 3mo ago
        https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427#m https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427#m
        Dilettante_ 3mo ago
        Seeing Jonathan blow invoked and his response in the comments tickled me pink
        inigyou 3mo ago
        Was it Casey Muratori that spoke about an AI educing allocations from 10k per frame to 200 per frame, but the manual programming work got it to 0 instead?
        yencabulator 3mo ago
- kokada 3mo ago
  Not that Claude Code is much better, I just hit this issue[1] because it seems setting DO_NOT_TRACK=1 seems enough to get a really strange behavior in the newest versions of CC. [1]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/69238#issuecomment-4753802631 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/69238#issue... Edit: I think I misunderstood OP, they're saying that CC is even worse and not better than Codex CLI.
- varjag 3mo ago
  Right, just yesterday I found my laptop kinda hot. And what do you think, it was good old Claude deciding to load a few cores with completely idling prompts.
  - cozzyd 3mo ago
    Yeah, somehow claude-cli sitting in a tmux session doing nothing uses my laptops battery twice as fast. Powertop suggests a ton of wakeups, but why? Is it busy polling the input or something?
    - varjag 3mo ago
      Polling the Department of Trade for Order 66
- iLoveOncall 3mo ago
  Surprisingly Kiro is fine (I work at Amazon but not at all on the Kiro team). I prefer it to anything else I've tried (except Amazon Q Developer in IntelliJ, but it's now deprecated).
  - epistasis 3mo ago
    Kiro is surprisingly good, if the interface for saving and resuming was slightly more reliable, and there was the hope of remote sessions, I'd probably switch to it full time. I vastly prefer it to having to fight against buggy force-fed features like UltraPlan or whatever.
- me551ah 3mo ago
  Claude is also weird for being the only coding assistant that for some reason doesn't support AGENTS.md. Codex, Amp, Cursor all of them support it and read from it, but not claude which forces it's users to use CLAUDE.md instead. The issue is the higest voted issue on their gitlab repo: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235
  - chorkpop 3mo ago
    CLAUDE.md has been incredibly successful for them advertising wise. I wouldn’t expect them to admit AGENTS.md exists anytime soon.
  - ValentineC 3mo ago
    My CLAUDE.md is just: @AGENTS.md And Claude processes it just fine. (I see that it's a common workaround, and there's a comment in the above link saying just this: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#issuecomment-3217884068 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#issuec...) It's a hassle having to add it to every repo that I use Claude with though, and I often use other models and harnesses too for the more trivial tasks.
    - troupo 3mo ago
      I beg people to learn what symlinks are. The fact that "put @AGENTS.md in there" is a "common workaround" shows why programmers (good ones at least) are not going anywhere soon.
      - ahtihn 3mo ago
        Symlinks are a pain if you're on Windows, I'd rather not bother with them.
        qwertox 3mo ago
        I never had any issues with them. And they fixed my problems in a good way.
- sambcui 3mo ago
  I don’t know if you can resonate, but I feel like the Vibe Coded codex and Claude Code desktop apps are iterating way faster than they should be.
  - malfist 3mo ago
    How are they iterating? I've not noticed anything major changing between the versions of my claude code. Other than that sometimes this version includes /btw and sometimes it's missing.
xpct 3mo ago
Well thank you for your service. I thought about trying out Codex after the disaster that is Claude Code. I'll be fine without either one on my machine
- jofzar 3mo ago
  Imo codex is significantly better then Claude code for me ATM.
- comboy 3mo ago
  I mean, Codex CLI is really bad. But Claude's CLI is so much worse. Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
- christophilus 3mo ago
  Codex is much better, which is to say, it’s only pretty bad.
nicce 3mo ago
Not only Codex, but I can't leave ChatGPT app in macOS open for few hours, because it will consume 60 gigabytes of RAM over time and crashes all the apps. Mindboggling. Or can't use Google's AI Studio in browser because it takes 100% CPU. Need to write own app for everything???
- veber-alex 3mo ago
  ChatGPT works ok for me but Whatsapp consumes 1000% cpu after the mac wakes up after sleep. I swear a few years ago shit like this didn't happen on macOS.
  - coldtea 3mo ago
    A few years ago vibe-coded crap apps like that didn't exist on macOS.
- porridgeraisin 3mo ago
  the damn chat.openai.com webapp lags a lot as well on long chats, typing takes so long.
  - rsfern 3mo ago
    In my experience the input field lags on short chats too, sometimes in the middle of writing the second or third prompt. Are they running some kind of prospective evaluation or something?
    - nicce 3mo ago
      When you are writing completely new prompt - it sends every character to server when writing and tries to make suggestions based on that. And keeps doing it in intervals in /prepare endpoint, during each prompt. So if you are working with something sensitive - don't write it to browser directly and edit it there.
      - porridgeraisin 3mo ago
hokkos 3mo ago
is it closed source ? i can see the rust code in repo contrary to the JS in claude code repo, are you mixing them up ?
- nicce 3mo ago
  Codex CLI is the main Rust code. There is Codex Desktop separately, using Electron and the same Codex CLI.
seviu 3mo 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.
- coldtea 3mo ago
  >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.
- drdexebtjl 3mo ago
  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.
- thewebguyd 3mo ago
  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.
r_lee 3mo ago
if we are at 10x with AI and near AGI or ASI, then how is it possible that these products (Codex, Claude Code CLI) are still such garbage? shouldn't this "agentic AI revolution" have long solved this already? no way they're over there saying "we are on it plz wait" or that "it's too much effort"?
- igleria 3mo ago
  This is the biggest elephant in the room I have seen in my decade+ career. At the same time, look how bad Apple is in software compared to its hardware... It's not an AI only problem, it's almost like software in general gets a free pass on being very unsafe or low quality because no one wants to face the same "profit reducing red tape" that civil engineers or similar face.
  - CharlieDigital 3mo ago
    Anthropic were the progenitors of the Model Context Protocol. Claude Code does not fully implement the client end of the protocol. A protocol; a literal pre-defined spec that an agent should be able to one-shot. Neither does Codex. Codex does not implement MCP Prompts. (I want Codex to implement MCP Prompts because then we have one central way to ship skills from a server). The fact that neither platform can implement a protocol given what is functionally infinite frontier model tokens really says a lot. I do not care what kind of random project some influencer can ship with a swarm of 1000 agents. If you cannot make the basics work, it is a farce.
    - deathbob 3mo ago
      It still boggles my mind that Anthropic would invent the MCP protocol but not fully implement it. Especially when fully implementing it (prompts, resources, tools) is easily done in harnesses that don’t ship with MCP but allow good extension / modification like Pi. Claude not being able to see its own usage or self invoke slash commands is also very frustrating.
      - 3mo ago
energy123 3mo ago
Let me guess, there's also a bug where they train on all our data?
- varjag 3mo ago
  They don't need to. You pay them for the privilege to do black box reinforcement learning already.
xenator 3mo ago
I have exactly the same problem with Time Machine spinner on macOS. It even doesn't rotate. Somewhere should be rare specialists with diploma who are capable of fixing such problems with waiting lists for years ahead.
markdog12 3mo ago
This software has been terrible for me. Burns tokens like crazy, and fails. Most times I try to use the browser plugin, it just says it can't use the plugin. When it does work, it takes minutes to click a button. Unusable workflow. I ask to generate a png with an alpha channel. It can't. Instead, it outputs a chroma-keyed image, then generates a python script to remove chroma key (fails), then a js script (which also fails). Then my 5h allotment is up. It's frustrating because if it worked as they advertise, it'd be an amazing tool.
- EMM_386 3mo ago
  Although they can technically do it, I wouldn't be asking LLMs to generate binary files like PNG with alpha channels, no matter how simple that may seem. If it's easy enough to manually create one yourself, I would do that. The best way for LLMs to do this is likely to write a scratch program (which is what it seems to have reached for in the second half), write code (which they are good at) and have the library create the image. At some point it is just easier to handle such things yourself, and use them with text-based formats.
jorl17 3mo ago
Claude code (desktop) and Codex (desktop) are both absolutely dogshit pieces of software. I can't pick which one is worse. I'd be sort of ashamed to say I actively worked on them, regardless of how they can empower people. Cursor's new UI is similarly terrible. They're all slowly getting better, but too slow for my taste. They are incredibly slow in unpredictable ways, eat up memory at an insane rate, and just feel like they were built with no regards for UX. Like they crammed together all the engineers with no idea of how to build a coherent and predictable UI and let them loose on the product without proper designers. The other day Codex (desktop) was eating up 70GB of RAM on my machine. What had I done? Literally nothing. I opened it and let it update once. Another one with Codex was when I had a specific conversation where no activity was happening and which would make the app spin up all of my CPU cores, rendering it barely usable. It would take seconds to react to anything or update the UI. The conversation wasn't even in focus!!! Restarting the app wouldn't help. After I archived it, it suddenly got better Claude Code Desktop used to be so, soo, soo slow and eat up so much RAM. It was unusable for anything other than playing around when I first tried it. It also didn't communicate any of what it would do. Using it was like living in a world with no affordances, constantly afraid of interacting with them and being faced with some sort of destructive action. Still, it has definitely been improving in terms of the UI experience. Cursor's new agents mode suffers from similar issues. Obscenely slow, hogging CPU without anything going on, breaking with existing UX patterns (some of them already well implemented in their other, more polished, previous version), confusing buttons and labels which don't explain what to do and that sometimes do destructive operations on your code. My favorite cursor absurdity is that if you use their workflow to create a worktree and the worktree setup script fails, the following happens: 1. The agent has no idea that it failed, let alone have any logs of the failure 2. Often you yourself don't get access to the logs of what failed in that script. Don't ask me, half the time it just says it failed with no further logs. 3. When you do get the logs, you cannot copy them in ANY way. You can't even select them. I have had to resort to taking a screenshot to do OCR on it I've also had cursor repeatedly have concurrency/race condition bugs when creating multiple worktrees in parallel. I have 5 tasks, I spin them up all together so they can create 5 worktrees and they crash with random internal cursor errors. Wasn't the point of this abhorrent new UI you've stuffed me with to enable parallelism? It's like people aren't even testing the shit they ship. Which I guess they aren't. I'm a big believer in AI and think it is changing the world and will continue to do so, but I almost get offended at how bad these products for which I am paying (sometimes quite a lot!) are. There's "move fast and break stuff" and then there's "build crap to call stuff".
NamlchakKhandro 3mo ago
Pi mono is the only true harness. Everything else is crap
- Supermancho 3mo ago
  If Pi can't use my MCPs, it's too big a step backward. Is the common tooling: https://github.com/nicobailon/pi-mcp-adapter https://github.com/nicobailon/pi-mcp-adapter ?
  - epistasis 3mo ago
    I imagine the answer varies greatly but what use cases do people find for MCP over standard command line calls? The only time I use MCP is when I'm supposed to test that an MCP is working. Everything else is just incredibly clunky and ugly. For example, connecting to Linear to grab a ticket is far easier and cleaner to copy and paste the text rather than to have the agent call the MCP and look it up by ticket name. I'm hoping I can find somebody else's MCP that could actually help me for once!
    - Supermancho 3mo ago
      I use a Godot MCP in addition to my Godot IDE and the Figma MCP The Godot Engine API (100s of calls) is not worth memorizing and Figma is visual based, along with a complicated engine-specific serialization. Much easier to ask an LLM to find out why one thing affects another or how to optimally generate a specific change by exploring those APIs. When the LLM eventually fails, to explain the available functions and triage a solution.
- corford 3mo ago
  What's wrong with Opencode? (I use it and like it)
tengada1 3mo ago
I had the exact same frustration and switched to Pi and have had zero complaints
CryZe 3mo ago
> THE SPINNER MESSAGE CAUSES 100% GPU USAGE ON AN MBP M5!! This seems to be a common Chromium problem across tons of software. GitHub has the same issue with its spinners, VSCode as well.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
Trialog 3mo ago
[dead]
giancarlostoro 3mo ago
> It's a tragedy. The world needs competition to anthropic. I agree, though Sam Altman's company is the last option I'd want to replace Claude with. I would sooner exhaust every open model.
stellamariesays 3mo ago
[flagged]
ljlolel 3mo ago
Building an open source native swift version that doesn’t have that bug: https://github.com/Lore-Hex/Quillcode https://github.com/Lore-Hex/Quillcode
iluvcommunism 3mo ago
[dead]
fps-hero 3mo ago
> THE SPINNER MESSAGE CAUSES 100% GPU USAGE ON AN MBP M5!! One conspiratorial idea I had was that this isn't a bug, and that Codex was actually doing computation on users' hardware under the guise of "thinking". Like Folding@home, or bitcoin mining malware, involuntarily on paying customers. Your usage is being subsidized by your personal compute hardware that you can't take advantage of unless it was being applied at massive scale. This would make even more sense when you consider that thinking and response time metrics aren't publicly being tracked. There is an assumption that LLM interaction is being processed as fast as possible, but this doesn't align with the reality of fixed hardware and oversubscription. Of course throttling is occurring. So, if you can take advantage of local compute, delay the responses and you have even more access compute! I find it difficult to believe that given the scale, number of users, and money involved, that someone hasn't fixed this "bug".
- CSMastermind 3mo ago
  Lol this was my theory as well.
Zenul_Abidin 3mo ago
I have been wondering why my battery dies quickly when I have codex open, even in my tray I only noticed the CPU spike with Process Explorer also in my tray.
tonic_note 3mo ago
They wrote an entire blog post about how Codex is entirely AI written and they militantly refuse to do anything by hand. Figures https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/ https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/
y1n0 3mo ago
> THE SPINNER MESSAGE CAUSES 100% GPU USAGE ON AN MBP M5!! Is that m5 specific? I’m not seeing on my m4 and I use codex (desktop and cli) quite a bit.
jiggawatts 3mo ago
Excel would use 100% CPU if you left a cell selected and your screen saver turned on because you were idle. That bug caused untold grief for multi-user session hosts / terminal servers / Citrix XenApp for a better part of a decade. Way before slopware! People forget that software written by people is… even worse. It’s like the self driving car debate: sure, the robot taxis will kill people on occasion, but people kill people regularly.
- fragmede 3mo ago
  What's the debate? Uber killed a person but that was the better part of a decade ago. I ride Waymo s and haven't been canceled. Not that I'd notice.
lxgr 3mo ago
> THE SPINNER MESSAGE CAUSES 100% GPU USAGE ON AN MBP M5!! Ah, so they ported that feature over from ChatGPT?
DrewADesign 3mo ago
> it's closed source for whatever reason. When working in an organization that defaulted to open sourcing everything, (even side projects,) there was only one reason any of us would keep something closed — embarrassment. Nobody wants to be the public face of some garbage code base. I’m sure that’s triply true when you’re using that code to justify exorbitant pricing.
supah 3mo ago
Back in the early days, people were saying the world needs Anthropic as a competitor to ChatGPT. Full circle.
saberience 3mo ago
If you think this about Codex, I'd be curious to hear your opinion on Claude Code. Claude Code eats RAM on my Macbook Pro like no other app I've experienced, Codex on the other hand seems way more performant, more consistent, less memory usage, less CPU usage etc. I've read to restart iTerm2 and my Mac several times because of Claude Code weirdness.

by b--l 3mo ago

l33tman 3mo ago

This was fixed long ago, if I'm thinking of the same bug. It was stuck in an inf loop all the time the codex window was open.

cncjvu7 3mo ago
Nah it's still doing weird shit. Uninstalled that crapware last week.

jofzar 3mo ago

> Codex is one of the most infamous examples of slopware Woah, let's not forget Claude code is right there

mvATM99 3mo ago
Yeah exactly. I'm not exactly building TUI's every day, but even i felt pain when i read that "small game engine" post
- TacticalCoder 3mo ago
  > I'm not exactly building TUI's every day, but even i felt pain when i read that "small game engine" post The bigger issue is they where somehow thinking it was "cool" and "advanced" while it's just a kludgy rube-goldbergy monstrous hack. Which is of course only semi-working: to me the model thinking what you see is what it outputs in the TUI is the deal-breaker for me. It's of course not working like that for they're apparently, in their "game engine", converting on the fly a headless browser to approximated characters to display in the terminal. So the model tells you he did output ASCII but people are copy/pasting (because, yes, at times you want to copy/paste) Unicode chars. Plenty of bug reports and pissed users. That's the bigger issue. The biggest issue is those thinking a 10 GB VM required to run a headless Electron browser and then fuxx0ring characters conversion is somehow an achievement.
  - dyarosla 3mo ago
    Whats the small game engine post?
    - gbnwl 3mo ago
      https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427#m https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427#m
      - Dilettante_ 3mo ago
        Seeing Jonathan blow invoked and his response in the comments tickled me pink
        inigyou 3mo ago
        Was it Casey Muratori that spoke about an AI educing allocations from 10k per frame to 200 per frame, but the manual programming work got it to 0 instead?
      - yencabulator 3mo ago
kokada 3mo ago
Not that Claude Code is much better, I just hit this issue[1] because it seems setting DO_NOT_TRACK=1 seems enough to get a really strange behavior in the newest versions of CC. [1]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/69238#issuecomment-4753802631 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/69238#issue... Edit: I think I misunderstood OP, they're saying that CC is even worse and not better than Codex CLI.
varjag 3mo ago
Right, just yesterday I found my laptop kinda hot. And what do you think, it was good old Claude deciding to load a few cores with completely idling prompts.
- cozzyd 3mo ago
  Yeah, somehow claude-cli sitting in a tmux session doing nothing uses my laptops battery twice as fast. Powertop suggests a ton of wakeups, but why? Is it busy polling the input or something?
  - varjag 3mo ago
    Polling the Department of Trade for Order 66
iLoveOncall 3mo ago
Surprisingly Kiro is fine (I work at Amazon but not at all on the Kiro team). I prefer it to anything else I've tried (except Amazon Q Developer in IntelliJ, but it's now deprecated).
- epistasis 3mo ago
  Kiro is surprisingly good, if the interface for saving and resuming was slightly more reliable, and there was the hope of remote sessions, I'd probably switch to it full time. I vastly prefer it to having to fight against buggy force-fed features like UltraPlan or whatever.
me551ah 3mo ago
Claude is also weird for being the only coding assistant that for some reason doesn't support AGENTS.md. Codex, Amp, Cursor all of them support it and read from it, but not claude which forces it's users to use CLAUDE.md instead. The issue is the higest voted issue on their gitlab repo: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235
- chorkpop 3mo ago
  CLAUDE.md has been incredibly successful for them advertising wise. I wouldn’t expect them to admit AGENTS.md exists anytime soon.
- ValentineC 3mo ago
  My CLAUDE.md is just: @AGENTS.md And Claude processes it just fine. (I see that it's a common workaround, and there's a comment in the above link saying just this: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#issuecomment-3217884068 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#issuec...) It's a hassle having to add it to every repo that I use Claude with though, and I often use other models and harnesses too for the more trivial tasks.
  - troupo 3mo ago
    I beg people to learn what symlinks are. The fact that "put @AGENTS.md in there" is a "common workaround" shows why programmers (good ones at least) are not going anywhere soon.
    - ahtihn 3mo ago
      Symlinks are a pain if you're on Windows, I'd rather not bother with them.
      - qwertox 3mo ago
        I never had any issues with them. And they fixed my problems in a good way.
sambcui 3mo ago
I don’t know if you can resonate, but I feel like the Vibe Coded codex and Claude Code desktop apps are iterating way faster than they should be.
- malfist 3mo ago
  How are they iterating? I've not noticed anything major changing between the versions of my claude code. Other than that sometimes this version includes /btw and sometimes it's missing.

xpct 3mo ago

Well thank you for your service. I thought about trying out Codex after the disaster that is Claude Code. I'll be fine without either one on my machine

jofzar 3mo ago
Imo codex is significantly better then Claude code for me ATM.
comboy 3mo ago
I mean, Codex CLI is really bad. But Claude's CLI is so much worse. Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
christophilus 3mo ago
Codex is much better, which is to say, it’s only pretty bad.

nicce 3mo ago

Not only Codex, but I can't leave ChatGPT app in macOS open for few hours, because it will consume 60 gigabytes of RAM over time and crashes all the apps. Mindboggling. Or can't use Google's AI Studio in browser because it takes 100% CPU. Need to write own app for everything???

veber-alex 3mo ago
ChatGPT works ok for me but Whatsapp consumes 1000% cpu after the mac wakes up after sleep. I swear a few years ago shit like this didn't happen on macOS.
- coldtea 3mo ago
  A few years ago vibe-coded crap apps like that didn't exist on macOS.
porridgeraisin 3mo ago
the damn chat.openai.com webapp lags a lot as well on long chats, typing takes so long.
- rsfern 3mo ago
  In my experience the input field lags on short chats too, sometimes in the middle of writing the second or third prompt. Are they running some kind of prospective evaluation or something?
  - nicce 3mo ago
    When you are writing completely new prompt - it sends every character to server when writing and tries to make suggestions based on that. And keeps doing it in intervals in /prepare endpoint, during each prompt. So if you are working with something sensitive - don't write it to browser directly and edit it there.
    - porridgeraisin 3mo ago

hokkos 3mo ago

is it closed source ? i can see the rust code in repo contrary to the JS in claude code repo, are you mixing them up ?

nicce 3mo ago
Codex CLI is the main Rust code. There is Codex Desktop separately, using Electron and the same Codex CLI.

seviu 3mo 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.

coldtea 3mo ago
>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.
drdexebtjl 3mo ago
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.
thewebguyd 3mo ago
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.

r_lee 3mo ago

if we are at 10x with AI and near AGI or ASI, then how is it possible that these products (Codex, Claude Code CLI) are still such garbage? shouldn't this "agentic AI revolution" have long solved this already? no way they're over there saying "we are on it plz wait" or that "it's too much effort"?

igleria 3mo ago
This is the biggest elephant in the room I have seen in my decade+ career. At the same time, look how bad Apple is in software compared to its hardware... It's not an AI only problem, it's almost like software in general gets a free pass on being very unsafe or low quality because no one wants to face the same "profit reducing red tape" that civil engineers or similar face.
- CharlieDigital 3mo ago
  Anthropic were the progenitors of the Model Context Protocol. Claude Code does not fully implement the client end of the protocol. A protocol; a literal pre-defined spec that an agent should be able to one-shot. Neither does Codex. Codex does not implement MCP Prompts. (I want Codex to implement MCP Prompts because then we have one central way to ship skills from a server). The fact that neither platform can implement a protocol given what is functionally infinite frontier model tokens really says a lot. I do not care what kind of random project some influencer can ship with a swarm of 1000 agents. If you cannot make the basics work, it is a farce.
  - deathbob 3mo ago
    It still boggles my mind that Anthropic would invent the MCP protocol but not fully implement it. Especially when fully implementing it (prompts, resources, tools) is easily done in harnesses that don’t ship with MCP but allow good extension / modification like Pi. Claude not being able to see its own usage or self invoke slash commands is also very frustrating.
    - 3mo ago

energy123 3mo ago

Let me guess, there's also a bug where they train on all our data?

varjag 3mo ago
They don't need to. You pay them for the privilege to do black box reinforcement learning already.

xenator 3mo ago

I have exactly the same problem with Time Machine spinner on macOS. It even doesn't rotate. Somewhere should be rare specialists with diploma who are capable of fixing such problems with waiting lists for years ahead.

markdog12 3mo ago

This software has been terrible for me. Burns tokens like crazy, and fails. Most times I try to use the browser plugin, it just says it can't use the plugin. When it does work, it takes minutes to click a button. Unusable workflow. I ask to generate a png with an alpha channel. It can't. Instead, it outputs a chroma-keyed image, then generates a python script to remove chroma key (fails), then a js script (which also fails). Then my 5h allotment is up. It's frustrating because if it worked as they advertise, it'd be an amazing tool.

EMM_386 3mo ago
Although they can technically do it, I wouldn't be asking LLMs to generate binary files like PNG with alpha channels, no matter how simple that may seem. If it's easy enough to manually create one yourself, I would do that. The best way for LLMs to do this is likely to write a scratch program (which is what it seems to have reached for in the second half), write code (which they are good at) and have the library create the image. At some point it is just easier to handle such things yourself, and use them with text-based formats.

jorl17 3mo ago

Claude code (desktop) and Codex (desktop) are both absolutely dogshit pieces of software. I can't pick which one is worse. I'd be sort of ashamed to say I actively worked on them, regardless of how they can empower people. Cursor's new UI is similarly terrible. They're all slowly getting better, but too slow for my taste. They are incredibly slow in unpredictable ways, eat up memory at an insane rate, and just feel like they were built with no regards for UX. Like they crammed together all the engineers with no idea of how to build a coherent and predictable UI and let them loose on the product without proper designers. The other day Codex (desktop) was eating up 70GB of RAM on my machine. What had I done? Literally nothing. I opened it and let it update once. Another one with Codex was when I had a specific conversation where no activity was happening and which would make the app spin up all of my CPU cores, rendering it barely usable. It would take seconds to react to anything or update the UI. The conversation wasn't even in focus!!! Restarting the app wouldn't help. After I archived it, it suddenly got better Claude Code Desktop used to be so, soo, soo slow and eat up so much RAM. It was unusable for anything other than playing around when I first tried it. It also didn't communicate any of what it would do. Using it was like living in a world with no affordances, constantly afraid of interacting with them and being faced with some sort of destructive action. Still, it has definitely been improving in terms of the UI experience. Cursor's new agents mode suffers from similar issues. Obscenely slow, hogging CPU without anything going on, breaking with existing UX patterns (some of them already well implemented in their other, more polished, previous version), confusing buttons and labels which don't explain what to do and that sometimes do destructive operations on your code. My favorite cursor absurdity is that if you use their workflow to create a worktree and the worktree setup script fails, the following happens: 1. The agent has no idea that it failed, let alone have any logs of the failure 2. Often you yourself don't get access to the logs of what failed in that script. Don't ask me, half the time it just says it failed with no further logs. 3. When you do get the logs, you cannot copy them in ANY way. You can't even select them. I have had to resort to taking a screenshot to do OCR on it I've also had cursor repeatedly have concurrency/race condition bugs when creating multiple worktrees in parallel. I have 5 tasks, I spin them up all together so they can create 5 worktrees and they crash with random internal cursor errors. Wasn't the point of this abhorrent new UI you've stuffed me with to enable parallelism? It's like people aren't even testing the shit they ship. Which I guess they aren't. I'm a big believer in AI and think it is changing the world and will continue to do so, but I almost get offended at how bad these products for which I am paying (sometimes quite a lot!) are. There's "move fast and break stuff" and then there's "build crap to call stuff".

NamlchakKhandro 3mo ago

Pi mono is the only true harness. Everything else is crap

Supermancho 3mo ago
If Pi can't use my MCPs, it's too big a step backward. Is the common tooling: https://github.com/nicobailon/pi-mcp-adapter https://github.com/nicobailon/pi-mcp-adapter ?
- epistasis 3mo ago
  I imagine the answer varies greatly but what use cases do people find for MCP over standard command line calls? The only time I use MCP is when I'm supposed to test that an MCP is working. Everything else is just incredibly clunky and ugly. For example, connecting to Linear to grab a ticket is far easier and cleaner to copy and paste the text rather than to have the agent call the MCP and look it up by ticket name. I'm hoping I can find somebody else's MCP that could actually help me for once!
  - Supermancho 3mo ago
    I use a Godot MCP in addition to my Godot IDE and the Figma MCP The Godot Engine API (100s of calls) is not worth memorizing and Figma is visual based, along with a complicated engine-specific serialization. Much easier to ask an LLM to find out why one thing affects another or how to optimally generate a specific change by exploring those APIs. When the LLM eventually fails, to explain the available functions and triage a solution.
corford 3mo ago
What's wrong with Opencode? (I use it and like it)

tengada1 3mo ago

I had the exact same frustration and switched to Pi and have had zero complaints

CryZe 3mo ago

> THE SPINNER MESSAGE CAUSES 100% GPU USAGE ON AN MBP M5!! This seems to be a common Chromium problem across tons of software. GitHub has the same issue with its spinners, VSCode as well.

deleted 3mo ago

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Trialog 3mo ago

[dead]

giancarlostoro 3mo ago

> It's a tragedy. The world needs competition to anthropic. I agree, though Sam Altman's company is the last option I'd want to replace Claude with. I would sooner exhaust every open model.

stellamariesays 3mo ago

[flagged]

ljlolel 3mo ago

Building an open source native swift version that doesn’t have that bug: https://github.com/Lore-Hex/Quillcode https://github.com/Lore-Hex/Quillcode

iluvcommunism 3mo ago

[dead]

fps-hero 3mo ago

> THE SPINNER MESSAGE CAUSES 100% GPU USAGE ON AN MBP M5!! One conspiratorial idea I had was that this isn't a bug, and that Codex was actually doing computation on users' hardware under the guise of "thinking". Like Folding@home, or bitcoin mining malware, involuntarily on paying customers. Your usage is being subsidized by your personal compute hardware that you can't take advantage of unless it was being applied at massive scale. This would make even more sense when you consider that thinking and response time metrics aren't publicly being tracked. There is an assumption that LLM interaction is being processed as fast as possible, but this doesn't align with the reality of fixed hardware and oversubscription. Of course throttling is occurring. So, if you can take advantage of local compute, delay the responses and you have even more access compute! I find it difficult to believe that given the scale, number of users, and money involved, that someone hasn't fixed this "bug".

CSMastermind 3mo ago
Lol this was my theory as well.

Zenul_Abidin 3mo ago

I have been wondering why my battery dies quickly when I have codex open, even in my tray I only noticed the CPU spike with Process Explorer also in my tray.

tonic_note 3mo ago

They wrote an entire blog post about how Codex is entirely AI written and they militantly refuse to do anything by hand. Figures https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/ https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/

y1n0 3mo ago

> THE SPINNER MESSAGE CAUSES 100% GPU USAGE ON AN MBP M5!! Is that m5 specific? I’m not seeing on my m4 and I use codex (desktop and cli) quite a bit.

jiggawatts 3mo ago

Excel would use 100% CPU if you left a cell selected and your screen saver turned on because you were idle. That bug caused untold grief for multi-user session hosts / terminal servers / Citrix XenApp for a better part of a decade. Way before slopware! People forget that software written by people is… even worse. It’s like the self driving car debate: sure, the robot taxis will kill people on occasion, but people kill people regularly.

fragmede 3mo ago
What's the debate? Uber killed a person but that was the better part of a decade ago. I ride Waymo s and haven't been canceled. Not that I'd notice.

lxgr 3mo ago

> THE SPINNER MESSAGE CAUSES 100% GPU USAGE ON AN MBP M5!! Ah, so they ported that feature over from ChatGPT?

DrewADesign 3mo ago

> it's closed source for whatever reason. When working in an organization that defaulted to open sourcing everything, (even side projects,) there was only one reason any of us would keep something closed — embarrassment. Nobody wants to be the public face of some garbage code base. I’m sure that’s triply true when you’re using that code to justify exorbitant pricing.

supah 3mo ago

Back in the early days, people were saying the world needs Anthropic as a competitor to ChatGPT. Full circle.

saberience 3mo ago

If you think this about Codex, I'd be curious to hear your opinion on Claude Code. Claude Code eats RAM on my Macbook Pro like no other app I've experienced, Codex on the other hand seems way more performant, more consistent, less memory usage, less CPU usage etc. I've read to restart iTerm2 and my Mac several times because of Claude Code weirdness.