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Naming and Product Confusion

Complaints about confusing naming between Codex CLI and Codex Desktop App, comparisons to Microsoft's naming problems, and difficulty understanding product distinctions

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Users are voicing significant frustration over the ambiguous "Codex" branding, struggling to differentiate between the open-source CLI tool and the proprietary desktop application. This confusion has drawn sharp, sarcastic comparisons to Microsoft’s notoriously convoluted product naming, with many lamenting that vague announcements make it impossible to tell if updates involve new AI models or just minor interface tweaks. Additionally, developers question the utility of features like image generation in a coding tool and express disappointment that the desktop app remains closed-source, which prevents the community from diagnosing the small "paper cut" bugs that often plague the user experience.

11 comments tagged with this topic

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Codex is a rust TUI app, and it's available as open source. It has nothing to do with Electron.
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Codex CLI is a TUI app, but Codex App is an actual desktop GUI app. If you actually look at the TFA, you'll see that all of the videos are of the desktop app.
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Codex is both a macOS app and a CLI/TUI app. Their naming is not very clear. The codex desktop app is somewhat of a frontend for the codex cli. By the look and feel of it I would guess it is written with Electron.
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Confusingly, Codex their agentic programming thing and codex their GUI which only works on Mac and Windows have the same name. I think the latter is technically "Codex For Desktop", which is what this article is referring to.
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It’s marginally better than Microsoft naming things.
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You mean you're not excited to use Copilot Chat in the Microsoft 365 Copilot App?? (This is the real, official name for the AI button in Office)
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Microsoft 365 Copilot For Business? (which isn't real - but yeah, the naming is...)
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> ... work with more of the tools and apps you use everyday, generate images, remember your preferences ... Why is OpenAI obsessed with generating imgaes? Do they think "generate image" is a thing that a software engineer do on a daily basis? Even when I was doing heavy web development, I can count the number of times I needed to generate images, and usually for prototyping only.
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Is it OpenAI Cowork?
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What does "major update to codex" mean? New model? Or just new desktop app? The announcement is vague.
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I wish Codex App was open source. I like it, but there are always a bunch of little paper cuts that, if you were using codex cli, you could have easily diagnosed and filed an issue. Now, the issues in the codex repo is slowly becoming claude codish – ie a drawer for people's feelings with nothing concrete to point to.