Hacker News

Yes this should be turned off by default. The daemon is useful when building apps on top of the daemon server, e.g. pi or pi-durable custom harnesses.

For whatever reason, the daemon has been refusing to start and Codex has been grumbling to me. I was wondering where the daemon had come from, and thought maybe I missed something previously and that it had just broken.

Yep, the real issue is that it was something they didn’t have before, and then with Codex 0.157.0 enabled, they installed this persistent nonsense [1] that survives after the last instance of Codex has exited on your machine, which is just gross.

  codex features disable daemon_auto_start
  codex app-server daemon stop
  pkill -f 'app-server daemon pid-update-loop'

All of the harnesses I've used are terrible at cleaning up after themselves. They leave all kind of clutter behind, to the point where on my dev VM, I now have an LLM run once a day to just look through the disk and delete everything that looks like it's leftover garbage.

It's like fighting fire by employing an arsonist.

Can't wait until we get really well designed harnesses written in a compiled language that doesn't bloat my computer. Will probably have to be written by a company other than OpenAI because codex is like the exact opposite of everything I just listed

My preferred Nix package for this patches at least that behavior out, afaict: https://github.com/numtide/llm-agents.nix/blob/dc285bfd94ec7...

https://github.com/numtide/llm-agents.nix/

> People moan about how badly made Claude code is but Codex seems much worse on every metric

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?

for some reason I had 11 separate codex and codex-code-mode-host binaries in my ~/.bun/install/cache/@openai . each weighing about ~300 MB. might be worth a look to anyone running low on disk space.

It’s extremely ironic that the software that’s meant to end software is itself pretty terrible software.

I haven't worked with the update subsystem before but that seems like an oversight to me. I'm gonna fix it.

Yep, .codex/packages/standalone/releases keeps all the old versions. Also each codex bin is somehow ~300MB.

what's the lazy way to check? can you share where/how you cleaned up?

Remember: VSCode runs a complete headless Eclipse instance as its Java LSP, so I don't expect quality code from any of the big companies anymore.

Even if you installed codex with brew?

Also, in Codex, one randomly can't click "New Chat" or "Scheduled Tasks". You know, the absolute two basic functions.

The CLI has been pretty good on this score, way better than the App. Has been…

You seem to care, so I wanna point out a semantic nit; "such a tool exists" could be interpreted as a harness provided tool, rather than a command line tool. (Edit, on a re-read its pretty obvious you mean cli tool, but keeping this statment here as im sure it'll open someone's eyes to the difference)

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.

Is there evidence to suggest that open ai business leadership values money over inspiring general public customer delight?

probably not much, they're all using workflows where the agents pull issues and automatically merge code when the tests pass. so lots of stuff slips through and the overall experience is kinda shite.

Nix/NixOS takes it a step further and makes you have to go out of the way to enable self-updating behavior when packaging something :)

What are the top ones you recommend? ( I am running Mint Debian Linux )

Ordinary package managers are totally capable of updating thousands of programs without manual effort, including automatically and in the background if that's a thing you want. But they do it without violating users' sovereignty over their own computers or turning every app into a special snowflake that gets to install software (namely itself) in its own bespoke way.

My browser doesnt update automatically, i have to approve it.

Maybe this kind of stuff is standard for some people but I absolutely loathe auto updating software for many reasons

You can do this without a daemon, and without storing n previous versions as noted by another user.

Serious tools shouldn't do this. Sure, you can offer an opt-in rapid release beta update option, but if you can't go more than a month without forcing me into a "stable" update that changes the UI and behavior I'm getting used to, then I'm not going to consider your software stable and reliable enough to be worth developing expertise in using.

If software engineering is solved they should be able to get it right the first time

Products moving fast doesn't mean that they're moving in the direction I want, or that I want them to move underneath me while I'm in the middle of a project.

Auto-update systems have value but are not a suitable default for professional tools.

Then use the package manager, or windows store on windows.

If running systemd, wrap that crap into a cgroup and force kill the whole process tree on exit. I've been doing it for years with badly behaving applications. On phone, from memory, may not be exactly what is needed:

  systemd-run --user --pty --wait --collect -p TimeoutStopSec=5s -- "$@"

This kind of stuff often breaks for applications packaged with Nix, so it's often removed from Nix packages for compatibility reasons. Both behaviors you mention are helpfully patched out of the Claude Code package I use: https://github.com/numtide/llm-agents.nix/blob/dc285bfd94ec7...

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.

And here is the issue raised in github: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/14980

TLDR: They don't care.

To be fair we've gone from barely capable at writing code to what we have today in barely 3 years. I wouldn't put money on the counter bet that they won't get beyond this hump.

Both CLIs are getting worse. I think it's because they keep bolting in unconsidered "features", not because of the code quality.

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.

I say this about 30 times a day, to nobody. "How the FUCK is this all so bad? They have unlimited tokens"

It has pretty rapidly reached the point where I do not think any acceptable LLM-harness is widely available. Every single one I've tried has broken in bizarre ways on even minor updates.

I find codex CLI to be a pretty high quality application. Is the existence of a backend daemon what you're referring to ?

I think the (lack of) quality of these tools shows that software engineering is maturing as an engineering discipline.

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.

Totally.

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.

The restraint, rigour and responsibility you showed prior to LLMs relates directly to how much of that you apply now that they’re here.

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.

There is actually even worse code quality written by humans, is that small sample also a reflection of human-driven development? And therefore, the future doesn't look promising that way either?

Seems like its just a bunch of young engineers making bad architecture decisions. Not sure I would blame the culture of vibe coding everything. It might just be bad taste.

I'm inclined to agree

i'm personally quite perplexed how sloppy the harnesses are from the leading AI labs, you'd think these are their primary products and would have some human attention devoted to them

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

Solar power has become a real transformative technology and instead of trying to recreate a better world we tariffed them and the execs of this country spent all our coins on power hungry data-centers that write mid code.

I'm sure if you file a bug on the 15k backlog they'll fix it eventually /s

Legit bugs still open 6 months on.. It's a bit ironic

> It's thus a user choice: if you don't like the automatic updating, you can just not run the application anymore.

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.)

It's as if there was a reason the whole industry was obsessed with quality up to like 3 years ago

I've been using Pi nearly every day for 4-5 months now, and even though it is still very much in development with new updates arriving nearly every week, it has to my mind never regressed. I've never lamented that a Pi update ever broke anything I depend on or made anything worse.

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.

Just be the 10th person to make one this week.

Exactly, that's what I do, I even up end up writing my own for this purpose - https://github.com/ashishb/amazing-sandbox

A well-behaved application should not only use XDG on Linux, but it should use platform-native conventions on macOS as well: "~/Library/Application Support", etc.

Today I used Claude Desktop after not having used it for a while. It ran bash commands on my machine, like starting brew services etc. It did not have that capability before (I used to hook up some mcp to allow selective file editing), and nobody warned me that it currently has. Shady tactics, very invasive, freaked me out.

Can you share some more detail of how you would implement this? Are you thinking something like VirtualBox (?), running a virtual machine, and you're using - for example, OpenCode terminal in the VM...?