—no-daemon is the way, but still feels like the noose is tightening …
https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2026-02-01-coding-agent-...
If you want something not NixOS-related, smolmachines.com (I haven't tried this yet) gets mentioned here a lot.
[features]
daemon_auto_start = false
--
1: https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/0c329ad2c9d5a2592128a1d...
codex features disable daemon_auto_start
codex app-server daemon stop
pkill -f 'app-server daemon pid-update-loop'
People moan about how badly made Claude code is but Codex seems much worse on every metric
It's like fighting fire by employing an arsonist.
...are you sure it wouldn't consider your personal files garbage?
Anyone experiences with it?
Also, it feels that chatgpt.com and aistudio.google.com are the buggiest websites I have seen for long time. Why it is always something related to LLMs?
https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/52251#issuecomment-60...
- Goals get blocked due to .git and other stuff becoming randomly read-only when daemon auto-updates in the background (the linked issue in my comment above)
- Goals get blocked due to transient "Selected model is at capacity"
- Goals get blocked due to "Codex ran out of room in the model's context window". Somehow, both auto-compaction and manually running /compact don't work. https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/52567#issuecomment-61...
- Goals get blocked due to bwrap randomly failing with `bwrap: loopback: Failed RTM_NEWADDR: Operation not permitted`. I traced this one to `apparmor` on Ubuntu 24.04 interfering with bwrap and found a local workaround.
If I need special actions, I just make them CLI tools on my Mac and tell the AI model that such a tool exists(via a single line in its system prompt) and that’s it. It’s been very nice.
[1] - https://usehax.dev/
No affiliation whatsoever. Just a happy user.
I've gotta give hax a go, as a pi user who came on-board due to the no frills direction pi takes. I say takes rather than took, because regardless of the (heated) discussion surrounding mcp and code mode support, I cannot fight the numbers- augmenting the harness provided tools is a notable boost to execution round trip performance.
I mostly stuck around with Hax because of a few design choices. The sessions are merely plain text files indexed by a dirpath slug. This means I can just start a hax session in that directory and expect sessions history to be available in any model.. (I occasionally dabble in GLM for security checks, Gemini for writing stuff, Deepseek for tightly scoped tests etc).
The recent terminal UI changes were more fastidious, but even those are easily disabled with CODEX_TUI_DISABLE_KEYBOARD_ENHANCEMENT=1 and the /tui command.
ls ~/.local/share/claude/versions/
ps auxww | grep "claude bg"
systemd-run --user --pty --wait --collect -p TimeoutStopSec=5s -- "$@"As a result, I never knew that Claude Code does a nasty thing like this, either. :-\
Fwiw, packages in that repo get version bumped each day, so if that's a fast enough pace for you it may be a good alternative.
TLDR: They don't care.
We considered the daemon thing, but ended up with a hard-update check on every boot. It's thus a user choice: if you don't like the automatic updating, you can just not run the application anymore.
And even with all that, it's hard to stay on the right side of AV algorithms, etc.
We wrote about it here: https://tritium.legal/blog/update
That's not a choice. It s just what most apps do these days, but it's the first time I've seen anyone stating this so directly, or trying to frame it as a choice.
(And behaviorally, this makes your product just a SaaS website with extra steps.)
[Edit: yes, that is kind of the idea. Native version has better features because it can access them.]
Not trying to sing praises; i think opencode is doing a bunch of weird stuff too but it's not codex level.
~/.codex/config.toml
[features]
daemon_auto_start = false
codex() {
command codex --no-daemon "${@:-.}"
}I don't know how and why they ruined this CLI with needless "features". It was perfectly usable two weeks ago.
Have a look at https://chatgpt.com/codex/install.sh. It's managing the installation by itself not using existing package managers. There's a good point to making it easy to install, but it leads to managing an installation when you shouldn't need to. Time would be better spent elsewhere and better solutions exist.
Am I the only one thinking this?
Just a couple of days ago, it was completely broken for about a week before it got somewhat fixed again. When I say fixed, I mean basic functionality is working again but bugs and regressions are still left. There are multiple issues tracking the same problems. The community have even started to patch the extension themselves as a workaround until its adressed.
You know whats even crazier? There are like a new release every other day with lots of commits and changes, yet it still in a bad shape. I have turned off autoupdate for Codex extension for this reason. The only extension I’ve had to.
I mean, it doesn’t take that much work to have some tests in the pipeline to make sure the extension continue to work, it almost feels like they are purposely doing this.
I have now experienced the consequences of ”move fast and break things”. I realize how much software quality means to me. Its not fun being on the receiving end, especially when it affects my daily workflow.
If any of you, see anyone hype up LLMs again, please refer them to the state of Codex vscode extension.
I immediately adopted the new tuiMode "fullscreen" feature the moment it landed, and it's been exceptional. I love the way it now manages the viewport -- this was also right about the time I migrated to Ghostty so that also made a big difference. Showing inline images with the Kitty graphics protocol has been a huge improvement too, I love it when a model calls `read` on an image file and I get to see the results in my terminal. The OSC-8 hyperlink support is super cool too. I love the way it auto hides/shows the scrollbar now too, and recently they've even made it so concurrent tool calls show different "themes" when pending/running vs success vs error.
Maybe this kind of stuff is standard for some people but I absolutely loathe auto updating software for many reasons
I travel for work, and often have a tech demo, solution, tool, or something to show - or am running a workshop.
I usually do NOT update things right before my trip, as I want to minimize the potential for disruption.
A human seems less likely to embark upon a path that most humans know leads to something a human is unlikely to want
LLMs produce amazing things, but only one token at a time. Anything beyond that is retrospectively emergent at best
Auto-update systems have value but are not a suitable default for professional tools.
This is partly due to the multiplicative scaling factor -- the number of tokens; the number of transformer layers; the number of features; etc.
I suspect that for models to have a step upgrade either/both of 1) a new/improved architecture model; and 2) better training of smaller parameter models are needed. I say the latter as I think that with the larger weights there is a lot of unused/redundant parameters.
I think newer models are more likely to produce the usuable output, almost always, but its still not great. The frequency in which you get usable results leads one to believe that quality is improving.. No usability is improving but the result is still meh.
Also put an llm in an environment without an lsp or compiler to check against and let me know how capable you think they are on their own. The "loop" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/healthcare/articles/godfat...
Progress is spiky and not guaranteed. The capital costs have also ballooned to the point where the rate has to level out
We don't see any indication that the LLM companies are slowing down and go for better code.
Instead it just looks like a cash grab until the AI bubble bursts.
But maybe being able to code up a feature at the drop of a hat has turbo-charged their ability to make bad UX decisions.
The latter requires modifying existing, badly architectured and tightly coupled code that will almost definitely break something somewhere else if touched, so what do you do? Just keep adding new code on top and hope for the best.
This is not a new phenomenon by any means, but AI amplifies it by 100x.
in the last 2 weeks or so: - scrolling stopped working - subagents no longer work (main agent doesn't get notified when they finish) - subagents don't work (a subagent can't make its own agent even if instructed to do so)
what's going on? I thought coding was solved?
That is exactly why it is so bad. Tokens spent generate code. Large amounts of code is a liability.
I use nixos and use a little wrapper that wraps Codex CLI in Docker. Run codex-box /path/to/project and it starts or reuses a container with only that project bind-mounted, keeping login and history in a separate volume. It uses tmux for detaching and reattaching
https://gist.github.com/entropie/8f30b9e33e9412fda3adf2f7507...
Maybe thats just the tool nerd in me that just wants the perfect tool for every job.
You install an update. Oops, they added a sandbox that doesn't work inside a docker container, it's stopped working.
You install an update. Oops, you can't log in inside a docker container any more, it's stopped working.
You install an update. Oops, they started catching the copy+paste shortcut and replaced it with one that doesn't work.
You revert a broken update. Oops, the update changed the format of your login details, the old version can't read them, gotta log in again.
You install an update. Oops, can't scroll with the mouse wheel any more.
Not showstopping bugs (if you're used to persuading broken oauth logins to work) but it certainly makes updating an "ugh, what have they broken this time?" experience.
We were overbuilding trivial parts of the software like the Romans overbuilt small bridges.
Modern engineering is about making the thing that barely works. If you disagree, learn a little bit about bit narrow the tolerances of modern cars and bridges are.
Buildings typically use a safety factor of 1.5 to 2.0, and cars typically use a safety factor of 2.0 to 3.0. These things are being built twice as strong as they need to be. I wouldn't call that narrow.
And with software, we're at a point where it can't even properly do what it needs to. If we were overbuilding it, damn software wouldn't crash so much.
The problem is hardly anyone gives a shit if they can pump out stuff that makes them look like they are good at stuff.
Vanity before engineering.
Given how rare it was previously, and how little it was cultivated by shortsighted management, I’m not surprised with all the slop we see today.
The truth is there’s nothing stopping someone from using these tools to remove dead code, simplify project structure, remove dependencies, etc. but I don’t see it happening very often. I have done it a bunch myself though so it’s absolutely possible, it’s all a matter of investment and prioritization.
it's embarrassing when every claude code release has obvious bugs in it like telling you to upgrade when you're on the latest version or codex opening visible powershell windows for every command that pop up on your screen
like 5 minutes of human testing would catch this obvious shit but obviously they don't bother because vibes are the future and stuff? idk
Legit bugs still open 6 months on.. It's a bit ironic
it's minimal and somewhat opinionated, not integrated well with memory subsystems (although that's kind of the point)
my only real criticism is that last I played with it it deals with slow provider responses very poorly , so lots of locally hosted llms require a lot of tuning to get it to handle streaming/non-streaming/timers well.
way less minimal (but still pretty minimal) I prefer Pi; but different markets I think.
hax fit my openbsd laptop well, espescially since Pi and related derivatives are kind of un-spokenly incompatible with the BSDs.
Also one brief note for Codex users specifically. hax can work out-of-the-box as codex-cli drop-in replacement (since it can use the already authenticated codex token), so it's super easy to try it - basically it will be a zero-config experience.
Jokes aside I do the same I tend not to upgrade my Mac, my phone unless I really have to.
The “update” button on the top of my brave install has now turned from green to orange and I’ll likely wait until it goes red
What? Pinning a browser?
First thing it'll want to do after starting is update itself to newest version anyway.
> [...] vs something that's rickety
A 100 percent of modern bridges are rickety. There has been dozens of high profile incidents because of this.
> Just because you built something that might fall apart at any moment doesn't mean it's been engineered with narrow tolerances.
Here the software they are building falls apart in ..say.. two days of use, but can be updated in 5 seconds at close to zero marginal cost. The software is useful enough that people keep updating and using it. This iteration gives them a competitive advantage over the safer choice of rigorously testing every new thing for several weeks.
The thing that really validated this point was when I recently tried Codex again. Out of the box it was OK, but not great. I swung over the memory apparatus and had it import directives from my existing Claude install and it was almost immediately quite useful in its own right and, especially, as a counterpoint to Claude when dealing with some fairly complex operational issues.
That's a pretty bold use of "has to". None of the financing behind AI seems sane, yet it continues to defy rational expectations. Reminds me of the comment "the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent". It's not the exact meaning but has the same feeling. The circular financing going on does not help anything either
This blogpost describes a similar thing: https://bxt.rs/blog/easy-sandboxing-on-linux-with-bubblewrap...
I think that's exactly the standpoint of Yann LeCun.
> The progress using narrowly intelligent algorithms to drive cars in a generalizable way was not as fast as the early gains in places the narrow algorithms could solve, thus the progress in using generally intelligent algorithms for any other field must also slow down.
Man, is this how 99% of the population works? They have a heuristic for anything that sounds computer sciencey and apply it for anything and everything that sounds similar without bothering to check if their heuristic actually applies?
> I’m reminded of
They were drawing a comparison, not saying "x will definitely happen because y"
The breathless astroturf articles, the brain-dead talking head conversations, the endless flood of obvious misinformation about industry uptake, the nauseating LinkedIn puff-pieces about PREPARING YOUR ENTERPRISE OR ELSE... it's a hostile information economy at best, and its being driven by the same people who brought you bullshit like self-driving, crypto and the Metaverse... for the exact same reasons (to get rich).
There's no epistemic credibility left in the tech industry in general. Maybe the Dario's or whoevers of the world believed what they were talking about at one point, but I don't believe a single word I read from Anthropic or OpenAI for the same reason I don't believe anything I read from Russian state media. I know it's being produced for reasons that have nothing to do with the truth.
As someone who interacts with the technology on a daily basis at a non-trivial level... I'm not seeing anything that would cure my skepticism about GenAI. The information economy surrounding it is broken. The fundamentals don't line up. The hype about "nearby capabilities" is identical to the hype of generations after generations of hype in the AI space (dating at least back to Turing). It smells like a bad bet.
https://x.com/FlorianKluge/status/2041855675295318039
(Whether that's against the ToS is not clear.)
Firefox does not only not prompt me for updates (it only updates if I manually run an update), even if I do update with Firefox running, it does not stop me from continuing to use Firefox without restarting it. All I did was install Firefox from flathub (packaged by Mozilla (a default configuration provided by Mozilla)).
https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/141.0/releasenotes/#:~...