Hi! Romain here, I work on Codex at OpenAI. We totally hear you. The team actually built the app in Electron specifically so we can support Windows and Linux as well. We shipped macOS first, but Windows is coming very soon. Appreciate you calling this out. Stay tuned!

Only thing i'd add re windows is it's taking us some time to get really solid sandboxing working on Windows, where there are fewer OS-level primitives for it. There's some more at https://developers.openai.com/codex/windows and we'd love help with testing and feedback to make it robust.

Electron? Why can't Codex write, or at least translate, your application to native code instead of using a multi-hundred-mb browser wrapper to display text? Is this the future of software engineering Codex is promising me?

Curios why electron not native?

Wouldn’t native give better performance and more system integration?

He literally says why electron in his comment that you are replying to

Going cross platform doesn’t sound the main reason (or I hope not). For a company that size, is it really hard to hire specialised small team?! It would be a good show case for their Codex too

They presumably use codex to build this. LLMs output is non-deterministic. Harder to keep the same logic across.

Would I love the, use swiftui on macos, wpf/winui om windows, whatever qt hell it is on linux? Sure

But it is what it is.

I am glad the codex-cli is rust and native. Because claude code and opencode are not: react, solidjs and what have you for a tree layer.

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Then again, if codex builds codex, let it cook and port if AI is great. Otherwise, it’s claim chowder

It is hard because this product will likely be obsolete next year based on how quickly AI is changing and evolving. Speed is king when you're on the frontier

Yes, exactly. "Just hire a small team and build native apps for another OS" is the recipe for taking a year to deliver instead of a month

When you're a trillion dollar company that burns more coal than Bangladesh in order to harness a hyperintelligent Machine God to serve your whims, you don't have the resources to maintain native clients for three separate targets.

Really hoped you'd say Linux next.

We should be able to make it available for Linux very soon as well!

If you were going to release a product for developers as soon as it was ready for developers to try, such that you could only launch on one platform and then follow up later with the rest, macOS is the obvious choice. There's nothing contemptuous about that.

Check out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46829029

Kudos to the OpenAI reps for responding to my comment and doing so politely.

My ire was provoked by this following on from the Windows ChatGPT app that was just a container for the webpage compared to the earlier bells and whistles Mac app. Perceptions are built on those sorts of decisions.

Because of that windows had thinking budget selectors for months before ios and macos (those got this only last week)

Windows is almost ready. It's already running but we are solving a few more things before the release to make sure it works well.