OpenAI has rewritten its forthcoming AI command-line coding tool, Codex CLI, in Rust, citing gains in performance and security, as well as avoiding dependence on Node.js which can be “frustrating or a blocker for some users.”
Codex is an experimental coding agent which runs either from a web browser within ChatGPT, or locally using Codex CLI. It has a chat-based user interface and the CLI runs either interactively, with prompts prefaced by the codex command, or in a non-interactive quiet mode that can be used in continuous delivery pipelines, for example to generate a changelog. The current Codex is not to be confused with a 2021 product also called Codex but which was deprecated in March 2023.
Codex CLI is open source on GitHub and runs on MacOS, Linux, or Windows via WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). The source code is largely TypeScript and runs on Node.js, but the team has now created a rewrite in Rust. Bugfixes will still be merged for the TypeScript implementation at least until the Rust version is at “experience and feature parity,” said maintainer Fouad Matin.
Why the rewrite? Matin said that although the current React and TypeScript-based version had been “easy to whip up and interate,” there are four key reasons why Rust will be an improvement.
