Codex CLI isn't quite as good as Claude Code (www.augmentedswe.com)

OpenAI released a major upgrade to its Codex line: GPT‑5‑Codex, a code-optimized variant of GPT‑5, plus an open‑source Codex CLI (written in Rust) that runs locally in your terminal. GPT‑5‑Codex is tuned for “agentic” coding tasks — it generates higher‑quality code, adapts its internal reasoning time to task complexity, and improves codebase navigation and review capabilities (it can traverse repositories, reason about dependencies, run builds/tests, and validate changes). It also adds better frontend/visual understanding, accepting images or screenshots to interpret UIs and show visual outputs. This matters because the CLI shifts AI assistance from sandboxed web chats into the developer’s natural workflow: the tool can read, modify, execute files in a project directory, invoke build/test commands, and search the web without copy‑pasting. That contextual access (filesystem + git repo awareness) is what turns LLMs from autocomplete into a more effective pair programmer or autonomous agent. It’s clearly aimed at the same use cases as Anthropic’s Claude Code; while comparable in purpose, maturity and agent orchestration experience may still differ. For engineers, the upgrade promises faster iteration, tighter feedback loops from automated tests, and richer UI-aware fixes — a significant step toward embedded, agentic developer tooling.