Codex CLI is going native

Hello! Thank you all for the excitement, feedback, and contributions over the past month or so since launch. It's been incredible to hear from all of you building with Codex CLI and now Codex in ChatGPT¹

Special thank you to all the contributors who opened PRs to improve the CLI for everyone. From fixing bugs to adding features, it's been a lot of fun co-developing this with all of you. We wanted to share an update on a few recurring themes: cross-platform stability, security, performance, and extensibility.

We're continuing to address feedback and fix issues that we hear from the community, while we've been working on a rewrite of Codex CLI into Rust. You can try it today by running:

npm i -g @openai/codex@native
codex

If you're a TypeScript developer like me, you're probably wondering why would we do this. High-level: we want to use the best tool for the job. While Codex CLI ships with a neat terminal UI, which has been easy to whip up and iterate with React-based ink ² - the core of this project is an "agentic" harness, aka calling the model in a loop.

Our goal is to make the software pieces as efficient as possible and there were a few areas we wanted to improve:

• Zero-dependency Install — currently Node v22+ is required, which is frustrating or a blocker for some users
• Native Security Bindings — surprise! we already ship a Rust for linux sandboxing since the bindings were available
• Optimized Performance — no runtime garbage collection, resulting in lower memory consumption
• Extensible Protocol — we've been working on a "wire protocol" for Codex CLI to allow developers to extend the agent in different languages (including Type/JavaScript, Python, etc) and MCPs (already supported in Rust)

We're planning to continue merging bugfixes in the TypeScript implementation, while we get the Rust implementation to experience and feature parity in the coming weeks. We'll share more updates soon on how TypeScript and other languages like Python will fit in long-term into this project.

If working in Rust, contributing to codex-cli, and building new modes of agentic coding is exciting to you - we're growing our team! Please reach out to us at: [email protected]

We're excited to hear your feedback on the new version of Codex CLI as we work towards making it the default experience in the coming weeks. Happy building!

Footnotes