I don't like this direction. For accessibility aspect, sure it is good. But Codex is a coding product. I am increasingly concerned of lack of reviewing practice. I doubt that a mobile app is good for reviewing code changes.
> Stay connected to active work from anywhere
... (and anytime because it's on your phone). No thanks.
Whats crazier is that Codex is free. I thought I had to pay to even try it out but nope, you can use the desktop app or cli for free, its apparently included in the free plan. You just have to sign in to your ChatGPT account.
Of course I am aware that the caveat here is that all my interaction is part of training, but I’m fine with that. Even Qwen Cli discontinued the free plan.
I was really unimpressed by the free Codex (for nodejs/react dev). I think it must be using a less powerful model or they’re limiting it in some other way.
Are you specifically pointing at a different experience between free + paid? Or just that the free version is unimpressive?
I'm using paid on TypeScript and it's genuinely terrific. Subjectively I think it has the edge over Opus.
I'd be surprised if OpenAI is hamstringing the free version. That would seem crazy from a GTM PoV. If anything the labs seem to throttle the heavy paid users.
I stopped using my Claude subscription because it became so prohibitive. Back to ChatGPT and Codex full time and been pretty happy. I miss the tone/writing style of Claude, but don't miss the frustration of being told I've reached my plan limits in a comically short amount of time.
Using these prompts/steering[0], setting Base style to Friendly, Warm to More, Enthusiastic to Default, Headers, Lists, and Emoji to Less, I have found I can get gpt-5.5 about ... 80% of the way there to writing as non-annoyingly as Claude. And it's so much faster and has such higher limits that that's worth it for me.
I also put together this ridiculous thing[1] because I missed the font and color scheme of Claude.
on Codex I ran into limits maybe like 2 times in 3 months, after doing several "upgrade this experimental game to my latest shared framework" passes on 5.5 Extra High
I have been using Omnara now some months, on desktop and mobile. It's web/mobile remote for Claude and Codex.
I can do some tasks on mobile, especially if they are follow up and steering only, greatly increasing productivity as you can keep working whilst in transit, etc.
I’ve been using Codex from my phone for the past couple of months (through a tunnel, not this app).
I was initially quite excited, but I’ve found the results are less than great compared to being at a keyboard.
Something about the smaller screen size and/or lack of keyboard causes me to direct the agent less, which in turn creates more tech debt/code churn/etc.
Maybe I’m just showing my age, and I should practice voice dictation or something more, but my thoughts flow faster and more clearly on a keyboard (less ums).
Is there a native way to work remotely with Claude/Codex on a local folder or git repo on your main machine without having to connect it to GitHub? For creating apps for personal use I’d rather just keep the files local.
Edit: Running into issues setting it up on Windows. There's no "/remote-control" command in the CLI, so I installed the Windows Codex app. Then I updated the iOS app which now has the "Codex" feature in the sidebar, which should allow remote access to the Windows machine's instance - except it doesn't connect. The iOS app shows my desktop's hostname, so it knows there's an instance there, but refuses to connect. Issues like this would persuade a lot of folks to switch back to Claude.
I ask because I tried the other week to use /remote-control in Claude, and it prompted to connect a Github repo with no local alternative. Things may have changed since then.
My experience today with the new Codex remote control has been that it doesn't connect at all.
You can also connect remotely. Tailscale to connect to your network/machine. Then use SSH to login. Then use tmux to persist the session even if you log out.
Dang, I thought this was going to be integration for Codex Cloud, not the (still not available for Linux) Codex App. Not even Codex CLI, alas. You can still access the Cloud option from a mobile browser well enough but I prefer an app UI for poking at the things on the go.
You can do this from the CLI - `codex remote-control` works on Linux (I have no affiliation, just something I noticed).
They might just not have cut a new build yet, today. It 'works' on master, but the mobile app thinks that your build is outdated (v0.0.0) if you build from master without overriding version, so probably easiest to wait until they cut a build if they haven't.
> You can do this from the CLI - `codex remote-control` works on Linux (I have no affiliation, just something I noticed).
Woah, hadn't seen this before!
Off-topic, how long compile times do people have for codex-rs in openai/codex? Even my very beefy computer takes like 30 minutes to compile in release mode, makes me wonder why it's so slow and how this TUI got so large. But then I remember, agents like to write a lot of code, compilers get slower when they have to compile a lot of code :)
Try turning off LTO. Their default codex-rs/Cargo.toml uses `lto = "fat"`, which is... expensive and slow and... you really really don't need it for a local build that you're not distributing.
In my experience, although the build is a little slow, it's that LTO step that takes a million years.
i'm not sure if i'm hallucinating, but i swear i had codex in the chatGPT app from long time ago (like the original codex on the web).
they added some new stuff, like remote control to wherever the desktop codex app is running, but these companies need to work much more on their press releases.
This is neat! Now I'm curious, what's left to innovate in the coding agent space? Sure there are the usual suspects like maintenance, security, reliability and other scalability improvements and looks like they will be addressed in the next year or two.
there is something "wrong" with the ux that is hard to pin down. these things generate even text summaries more rapidly than i can read them. i need a better method for dumping info into my brain + dynamic control (if necessary)
When I take time to read all of the output, I often find that it's mostly noise. I don't like noise so I usually don't bother.
But a person can use subagents, if they want, to filter that down. This burns tokens in a big hurry, but I think subagents can be arbitrary local commands (eg, a local LLM).
Or, you know: Just slow down. :) It doesn't always have to be a race, does it?
Say what you want about OpenAI, but their software is actually pretty dam good especially compared to Anthropic and Google. Anthropic is just sloppy, and Google just doesn't live on this planet.
Both of the Codex apps are very good.
I tried this out and it works significantly better than Claude's remote control in fact the first few times I tried Claude's remote control it didn't even work and to this day is very buggy.
It's refreshing that unlike Anthropic's Remote Control, this actually... works.
Feels like a testament to the value in taking time and doing it properly.
Now if only codex got its 1M token context window back.
---
Edit: Hmmm. Maybe I spoke too soon. Sigh. Definitely _more_ reliable by far overall, but still have queued messages with responses on my phone that don't show up on my computer, and responses that don't show up on my phone.
Edit 2: New threads created from my phone seem to have a little stall-out, but ones that are underway are behaving reasonably well.
Out of curiosity, what issues did you face with remote control on claude? I use it daily and it seems to work pretty well (bar the issues when my Mac would sleep and then the session would disconnect, but that's an issue on my end).
Myriad, to be honest. I find it to just constantly be in a 'torn' state, the UI is very mushy on mobile with a lot of the affordances from desktop missing, and... it's distinctly less useful when you can't... edit, rewind, start a new thread, etc.
Codex has been great in the last 3-4 months I've been using it, almost exclusively to review existing GDScript code, and this was the feature I wanted most, because with gamedev you get the best ideas when you're out and about or in bed :)
Claude on the other hand has been jank all around from the UX to the UI to the AI itself that it's baffling how it's more popular here on HN: https://i.imgur.com/jYawPDY.png
Sadly this remote control feature doesn't seem to be for Mac to Mac yet? I love the MacBook Neo as a "thin client" for AI and keep the MacBook Pro at home/hotel, and it would be nice to share Codex desktop sessions (without SSH → resume link)
opencode behind a nginx proxy with a standard user/password is sufficiently powerful. You can also upgrade to https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-code-server/ and run any vscode plugins; opencode's plugin is pretty rudimentry but cline has been making a lot of strides.
You can run your local LLM and just connect the docker containers. I'm paranoid of being disconnected from the LLM, so I never run any of this on the same machine, so orchestrating a docker-compose file that provides the necessary services is important.
I'm still trying to find a good remote file system to loop into the setup for improved switching between cli and these web containers.
For many people, that's exactly why this is useful: less time on the computer, more time doing other things and occasionally checking in.
In those scenarios, the goal is not "work at any time" but to "be anywhere at any time", or, rather, to "be able to work from anywhere, doing anything".
The best way I've found to work with LLMs is another OpenAI project, Symphony (which I implemented for Linear/GitHub and OpenCode[0]).
It integrates with your issue tracker and makes the tracker the UI for the LLM. It also clones the repo for every ticket, and can set up fixtures/etc. I can work on multiple items at a time, which is fantastic because otherwise you have to wait for the LLMs a lot.
> Stay connected to active work from anywhere
... (and anytime because it's on your phone). No thanks.
Of course I am aware that the caveat here is that all my interaction is part of training, but I’m fine with that. Even Qwen Cli discontinued the free plan.
I'm using paid on TypeScript and it's genuinely terrific. Subjectively I think it has the edge over Opus.
I'd be surprised if OpenAI is hamstringing the free version. That would seem crazy from a GTM PoV. If anything the labs seem to throttle the heavy paid users.
I also put together this ridiculous thing[1] because I missed the font and color scheme of Claude.
[0] https://gist.githubusercontent.com/dmd/91e9ca98b2c252a185e8e...
[1] https://github.com/dmd/aimpostor
I can do some tasks on mobile, especially if they are follow up and steering only, greatly increasing productivity as you can keep working whilst in transit, etc.
I was initially quite excited, but I’ve found the results are less than great compared to being at a keyboard.
Something about the smaller screen size and/or lack of keyboard causes me to direct the agent less, which in turn creates more tech debt/code churn/etc.
Maybe I’m just showing my age, and I should practice voice dictation or something more, but my thoughts flow faster and more clearly on a keyboard (less ums).
Edit: Running into issues setting it up on Windows. There's no "/remote-control" command in the CLI, so I installed the Windows Codex app. Then I updated the iOS app which now has the "Codex" feature in the sidebar, which should allow remote access to the Windows machine's instance - except it doesn't connect. The iOS app shows my desktop's hostname, so it knows there's an instance there, but refuses to connect. Issues like this would persuade a lot of folks to switch back to Claude.
My experience today with the new Codex remote control has been that it doesn't connect at all.
They might just not have cut a new build yet, today. It 'works' on master, but the mobile app thinks that your build is outdated (v0.0.0) if you build from master without overriding version, so probably easiest to wait until they cut a build if they haven't.
Woah, hadn't seen this before!
Off-topic, how long compile times do people have for codex-rs in openai/codex? Even my very beefy computer takes like 30 minutes to compile in release mode, makes me wonder why it's so slow and how this TUI got so large. But then I remember, agents like to write a lot of code, compilers get slower when they have to compile a lot of code :)
In my experience, although the build is a little slow, it's that LTO step that takes a million years.
they added some new stuff, like remote control to wherever the desktop codex app is running, but these companies need to work much more on their press releases.
Or ask Codex to create image that explains xyz.
But a person can use subagents, if they want, to filter that down. This burns tokens in a big hurry, but I think subagents can be arbitrary local commands (eg, a local LLM).
Or, you know: Just slow down. :) It doesn't always have to be a race, does it?
Both of the Codex apps are very good.
I tried this out and it works significantly better than Claude's remote control in fact the first few times I tried Claude's remote control it didn't even work and to this day is very buggy.
Feels like a testament to the value in taking time and doing it properly.
Now if only codex got its 1M token context window back.
---
Edit: Hmmm. Maybe I spoke too soon. Sigh. Definitely _more_ reliable by far overall, but still have queued messages with responses on my phone that don't show up on my computer, and responses that don't show up on my phone.
Edit 2: New threads created from my phone seem to have a little stall-out, but ones that are underway are behaving reasonably well.
Claude on the other hand has been jank all around from the UX to the UI to the AI itself that it's baffling how it's more popular here on HN: https://i.imgur.com/jYawPDY.png
Sadly this remote control feature doesn't seem to be for Mac to Mac yet? I love the MacBook Neo as a "thin client" for AI and keep the MacBook Pro at home/hotel, and it would be nice to share Codex desktop sessions (without SSH → resume link)
You can run your local LLM and just connect the docker containers. I'm paranoid of being disconnected from the LLM, so I never run any of this on the same machine, so orchestrating a docker-compose file that provides the necessary services is important.
I'm still trying to find a good remote file system to loop into the setup for improved switching between cli and these web containers.
In those scenarios, the goal is not "work at any time" but to "be anywhere at any time", or, rather, to "be able to work from anywhere, doing anything".
Sort of....I guess.
It integrates with your issue tracker and makes the tracker the UI for the LLM. It also clones the repo for every ticket, and can set up fixtures/etc. I can work on multiple items at a time, which is fantastic because otherwise you have to wait for the LLMs a lot.
[0] https://github.com/skorokithakis/symphony
you need a model server - ollama/llama.cpp/lm studio