Summarizer

I don't think Claude has this part yet: > With background computer use, Codex can now use all of the apps on your computer by seeing, clicking, and typing with its own cursor. Multiple agents can work on your Mac in parallel, without interfering with your own work in other apps.

>background computer use How does that even work technically? macOS doesn't support multiple cursors. On native Cocoa apps you can pass input to a window without raising via command+click so possibly they synthesized those events, but fewer and fewer apps support that these days. And AppleScript is basically dead, so they can't be using that either. I also read they acquired the Sky team (who I think were former Apple employees). No wonder they were able to pull of something so slick.

Claude Cowork is unusably slow on my M1 MacBook Pro. I wonder if Codex is any better; a quick search indicates that it is also an electron app

Codex is a rust TUI app, and it's available as open source. It has nothing to do with Electron.

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.

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.

> Codex is a rust TUI app, and it's available as open source. It has nothing to do with Electron. I just updated Codex and looked inside the macOS app package. It is most definitely still an Electron app.

the codex desktop app is electron, as is claudes

can't test pygame otherwise :D

Its not magic. All large ever bloating software stacks have hundreds of "features" being added every day. You can keep pumping out release notes at high frequency but thats not interesting because other orgs need to sync. And sync takes its own sweet time.

My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far. i.e. agents for knowledge workers who are not software engineers A few thoughts and questions: 1. I expect that this set of products will be extremely disruptive to many software businesses. It's like when a new VP joins a company, they often rip and replace some of the software vendors with their personal favorites. Well, most software was designed for human users. Now, peoples' agents will use software for them. Agents have different needs for software than humans do. Some they'll need more of, much they'll no longer need at all. What will this result in? It feels like a much swifter and more significant version of Google taking excerpts/summaries from webpages and putting it at the top of search results and taking away visits and ad revenue from sites. 2. I've tried dozens of products in this space. For most, onboarding is confusing, then the user gets dropped into a blank space, usage limits are uncompetitive compared to the subsidized tokens offered by OpenAI/Anthropic, etc. It's a tough space to compete in, but also clearly going to be a massive market. I'm expecting big investment from Microsoft, Google etc in this segment. 3. How will startups in this space compete against labs who can train models to fit their products? 4. Eventually will the UI/interface be generated/personalized for the user, by the model? Presumably. Harnesses get eaten by model-generated harnesses? A few more thoughts collected here: https://chrisbarber.co/professional-agents/ Products I've tried: ai browsers like dia, comet, claude for chrome, atlas, and dex; claw products like openclaw, kimi claw, klaus, viktor, duet, atris; automation things like tasklet and lindy; code agents like devin, claude code, cursor, codex; desktop automation tools like vercept, nox, liminary, logical, and raycast; and email products like shortwave, cora and jace. And of course, Claude Cowork, Codex cli and app, and Claude Code cli and app. Edit: Notes on trying the new Codex update 1. The permissions workflow is very slick 2. Background browser testing is nice and the shadow cursor is an interesting UI element. It did do some things in the foreground for me / take control of focus, a few times, though. 3. It would be nice if the apps had quick ways to demo their new features. My workflow was to ask an LLM to read the update page and ask it what new things I could test, and then to take those things and ask Codex to demo them to me, but it doesn't quite understand it's own new features well enough to invoke them (without quite a bit of steering) 4. I cannot get it to show me the in app browser 5. Generating image mockups of websites and then building them is nice

Maybe but the product category is not necessarily a monolith in the same way that Claude Code is. These general purpose tools will have to action across a heterogeneous set of enterprise systems/tools. A runtime environment must be developed to do that but where that of the agent ends and that of the enterprise systems begins is a totally open question.

I mean there is a runtime layer that needs to be developed, and some of it may live in CC/Codex and some might live in the various enterprise systems. Someworkflow automations and some amount of the semantic layer may for instance exist in your CRM/ERP/data platform. Yes the front-end would be owned by the chat interface, but part of the solution may exist in the various enterprise systems. This would be closer to a distributed system than a monolith. The demos and marketing language point to this as the direction of travel (i.e. the reference to Atlassian Rovo, etc.).

My view is different. Agent products have access to tools and to write and run code. This makes them much more useful than raw models.

Yes, I think they unlock a whole new level of capability when they have a r/w file system (memory), code execution and the web.

SSH to devboxes is the exact usecase for services like https://shellbox.dev : create a box using ssh... and ssh into it. Now web, no subs. Codex can create it's own boxes via ssh

the awkward part isn't just about reading sensitive files. search, listings, direct reads, browser and computer use all sit behind different boundaries. hard to tell what any given approval actually buys or exposes.

I think the killer feature in this release is the background GUI use. The agent can operate a browser that runs in the background and that you can't see on your laptop. This would be immensely useful when working with multiple worktrees. You can prompt the agent to comprehensively QA test features after implementing them.

OpenClaw acquisition at work.

The macOS app version of Codex I have doesn't show reasoning summaries, just simply 'Thinking'. Reasoning deltas add additional traffic, especially if running many subagents etc. So on large scale, those deltas maybe are just dropped somewhere. Saying that, sometimes the GPT reasoning summary is funny to read, in particular when it's working through a large task. Also, the summaries can reveal real issues with logic in prompts and tool descriptions+configuration, so it allowing debugging. i.e. "User asked me to do X, system instructions say do Y, tool says Z which is different to what everyone else wants. I am rather confused here! Lets just assume..." It has previously allowed me to adjust prompts, etc.

I'm switching because of the higher usage limits, 2x speed mode that isn't billed as extra usage, and much more stable and polished Mac app.

Side note: I really wish there was an expectation that TUI apps implemented accessibility APIs. Sure we can read the characters in the screen. But accessibility information is structured usually. TUI apps are going to be far less interesting & capable without accessibility built-in.

I don't see how it's possible to support Linux with Wayland, unless you limit the automation only to the browsers.