OpenAI CLI (github.com)

75 pointsby armcat3 hours ago44 comments

isodev 5 minutes ago

Wait, wasn't codex the "openai cli"? Their product names are so confusing (chat, vs. work ?!).. almost like the whole thing is vibecoded.

throw20261022 2 hours ago

Be careful getting too deep in OpenAI tooling because they end up deprecating almost everything in under two years, sometimes without even a formal notice.

Everything they make these days looks to be strongly vibecoded without a decent review or functional testing. This leads to basic avoidable bugs that annoy vast numbers of users.

Not only this, but when you point out an issue to them on GitHub, they have a history of blocking the reporting user instead of tackling the technical issue.

xnickb 2 hours ago

Makes sense. Very hard for humans to keep up with LLM-generated code. But LLMs/Agents have no problem with this. So they are using the dev style that would drive their business towards generating more money. A funny concept for a non-profit organization.

ywvcbk 2 hours ago

I don't see how buggy software directly leads to generating more money? A company being successful doesn't somehow magically make them infallible, 100% rational or immune to making mistakes (as you are implying).

XenophileJKO an hour ago

I don't know why people keep harping on buggy software.. it really is the average not the exception. I mean we see this with all the defects in existing software that agents find.

I love how people all pretend that they and most engineers are god like programmers. Sure, some people are really good. My 30 years of experience say that is like 5%, maybe if you are at google or a really good start up, that can creep up to 30-50%.

By far the majority of engineers are not elegant or even really craftsman like. Add to this that unless you are working on a pet project you are usually neck deep in something that has had teams working in it for years.

It creates situations where most engineers don't really know what the code base does below the surface area where they are making feature changes. So work gets cobbled on or patched in where people are comfortable making changes.

All I can say is I would much rather have 3 open Opus 5.5 instances than a team of 3 working for me if we are only talking about delivering high quality code. I don't think that is the only value of engineers, but I think we are at a point where the models have way exceeded average engineer ability. There are still tendencies for "compatability everything" and "don't rock the boat" in the current frontier LLMs that can create architectural issues, but if you know what to look for when working, it isn't generally an issue.

I mean just remember how mush everyone complained about buggy games or MacOs or whatever before LLMs even came around.

xnickb 19 minutes ago

> as you are implying

I am not implying that at all. All I'm saying is that humans can't keep up with LLM/agent rates of code generation but agents come, so what is unusable for humans is ok for LLMs.

And LLMs being required is very profitable to those who sell LLMs.

Never did I imply any bugs

lionkor 2 minutes ago

> Very hard for humans to keep up with LLM-generated code

Not at all. It's hard to keep up with lines of code per day, i.e. quantity.

It's not difficult for humans to keep up with the quality.

Let's say you can let AI design and 3D print 1 large real-life bridge per week. Would you say that humans can't keep up? Or would you point out that there's a difference between what civil engineers do and what an LLM with a 3D printer does?

eddythompson80 an hour ago

At this point, it’s safe to assume all net-new software is vibecoded. Who in their right mind would take a month to create an MVP when a bot can spit it out in an afternoon? Existing software isn’t necessarily immune, but there are still individuals that are fighting (or resisting the change) to keep their code base human readable. It’s a losing battle. Eventually those people are either gonna change their minds, leave or be pushed out. Then the agents will be unleashed upon those code bases too.

orphereus an hour ago

This type of comments is making me insane.

redanddead an hour ago

Most people are practical

frevib an hour ago

This type of comments gives me the impression that HN is riddled with AI marketing bots.

jiggawatts an hour ago

Reality is making you question your sanity.

The comments are just accurately describing that new, insane reality.

eddythompson80 40 minutes ago

I don't really know what to say tbh. I feel insane at times too but I'm being a realist and a pragmatist. I think I'm in the "changed their mind" camp because I got tired of fighting and can't deny reality. It is a losing battle. All approaches to manage changes in a traditional way also don't work. I have seen people who left because they can and I might follow suit too.

Like I think (or know) code reviews are also over. Someone asks me for a 10-11am brainstorming meeting regarding a concept they are working on, at 11:15 they have a "design doc" ready, at 1pm they ping me if I had a chance to review it yet, at 3pm I approve it, at 3:30pm they send a 7k line PR... "dude, that's not ok. I'm not reviewing 7k line change" so they say "oh yes absolutely sorry about that. that makes a lot of sense. Do you want 7 1k-line PRs? or 14 500-line PRs?" "hey Claude, split this into 10 commits and open 10 stacked PRs" :|

solyin 2 minutes ago

> Like I think (or know) code reviews are also over.

Whatever the size of code review chosen, merging totally unreviewed code to prod is still totally insane. There are a few AI code review products out there. The one I've used is fairly decent at picking out issues, though there's definitely some shortcomings vs a human reviewer with additional context (especially since not everything is written down for the bot to access). So I wouldn't say they are over. Even though the AI review isn't perfect, we all know human reviews aren't either.

As AI improves it'll be able to hold more of the codebase as context, enabling better, quicker reviews.

vasco an hour ago

I'm so curious what you do when the providers go down. Do you tell your boss you can't fix the incident because your token quota is out?

ilteris an hour ago

This reminded me my dad's story. "In highschool we used to tell our teachers we couldn't do our homework because lights were out." Take anyway you want.

geraldwhen 41 minutes ago

…yes? This is the equivalent of an electrician showing up to your house without tools.

It would be faster to setup a deepseek locally hosted instance or glm than try and build by hand, assuming all hosted providers were down somehow.

Which is to say, there is no token quota. If you run out you buy more.

bojan 40 minutes ago

Sort of, that's the mindset you get because you've no clue how the app actually works.

We have a 100% vibe-coding team, and yes, when they couldn't pass through the CI/CD at some point, they contacted the Ops team and literally said "the agent said the problem is on your side".

kikdij 39 minutes ago

How many times have you heard "we can't work because GitHub is down?". This has nothing to do with AI, and yes, it's commonplace.

Not to mention the "yes, there's a bug. We opened a ticket to the maintainer. Now we wait".

anonymous908213 an hour ago

> Who in their right mind would take a month to create an MVP when a bot can spit it out in an afternoon

The people who need something more than an MVP, I would suppose. Bot sure does spit out a prototype faster than any human can, but actually building on that dogshit prototype becomes slower than someone with a clue writing by hand.

rkuodys 41 minutes ago

While I agree with the premise, I would argue with the conclusion. Yes agents can and do code fast. But if you're integrating software in business where people work in some patterns, more often than not there are "real life" happening. You learn that only by operating a system long enough to know these things. And competence accumulates, and the value of provider increases with the learned patterns. I think many devs live in tech world which is sometimes detached from physical world, world where people actually has to do some work, which takes time and system working in technical sense, doesnt work in practical sense.

kikdij 41 minutes ago

Saying "surely, everybody does X" is a sure way to be wrong. You're even spectacularly failing at making your own point by acknowledging in the very same comment that there are, in fact, people not doing it. Some people are different from you, deal with it.

That being said, it's true than we can assume most of new software are generated. No need for hyperbole on that. An interesting fact is that it makes grandfather's concern moot: people who are generating their code don't care much if a dependency goes unmaintained, they can have it replaced by an other one in matter of minutes.

There's an other objection to openai-cli we could raise, though: why use a generalist developer tool, containing probably hundred of features we don't need, when we could make a bespoke specialized version, perfectly fit to us, in like 25 minutes? I can get that there are audiences where this would not even come to mind to the users, but we're talking about a developer tool, here. The value of that is questionable. And ironically, those who might from benefit it the most are those who don't want to generate their code.

bryanrasmussen 22 minutes ago

they didn't say "surely everybody does" they said "safe to assume all", when really what they should have said is "safe to assume any" meaning any that you encounter and consider using.

I think it makes sense as a reasonable heuristic going forward, assume the MVP was vibe coded or nearly vibe coded (a weeks worth of human / agent work together, then initial release)

eddythompson80 7 minutes ago

You put it better than me

pianopatrick 36 minutes ago

Yeah, but then you get the user's side. Will users really trust and rely on software that was vibe coded in an afternoon? Maybe for games, but for something like a CLI you would depend on - do you want to depend on someone's vibe coded in an afternoon project?

ky-hy 26 minutes ago

99% of people don't care, it's us programmers that are living in a bubble thinking that other people prioritize same stuff as we do. So yes, people won't care and will depend on someone's vibe coded apps, just like they use Windows, Adobe and whatnot even though those suck.

eddythompson80 24 minutes ago

I don't know the answer. I suspect the answer today is yes for any "boxed" products like CLIs, desktop apps, mobile apps, simple client side apps, SDKs, etc. Complex services that have a livesite and deployment orchestration and numerous moving parts are still struggling, but everyone is pushing there too anyway.

As for users, I think it depends on the individual users. A lot of the time users abstract your software as a blackbox. It either works or it doesn't, and as long as you can fix it quickly and they get every bizarre feature ask answered quickly, that's all what some care about.

Personally, I have an all times low trust in the software I run. I used to cruise Show HN, /r/selfhosted, and GitHub Trending for cool new software to play with, learn from, or get inspired by. I don't anymore because I see what agents generate at work all day long.

There used to be this old joke among us programmers that we think it's insane that people trust their life to software when we all know how buggy it all can be. It was true, but also we knew that we can eventually get decent enough software. This is also out of the window now. Everything on all those places is a vibecoded thing generated in a couple of hours and no one knows what code is in there. It'll only get worse.

aenis 5 minutes ago

Sure they will. Case in point: Claude Code. I think its being vibe coded every afternoon, and indeed lots of programmers gladly take it with its various and often-changing quirks and small bugs. No biggie, it still gets the job done.

Chyzwar 30 minutes ago

This is not unique problem to vibecoding. Google was killing products before LLM and forcing you into deprecation churn loop for years. Problem is companies without strategy trying things and then moving to next shiny thing.

I am still salty about anthropic killing Claude design in December.

yuchi 13 minutes ago

Claude Design was/is absolutely brilliant. The embedded skill in work and code is capable but the experience of Claude design was so much cleaner.

andai 24 minutes ago

https://xkcd.com/1483/

>Eventually all the people who hate this kind of thing are going to be dead, and the ones who use it are going to be in control.

The West has fallen.

eddythompson80 10 minutes ago

There was a generation of programmers who obsessed about memory alignment, bit packing, SoA vs AoS, memory arenas, handwritten assembly, etc. For well over a decade now, a todo app would take 800MB in RAM, but it has really cool mark-done animation so people would use it. If it's slow on your machine, get the new i7 or M58 mac to experience this awesome todo app.

rusticpenn 2 minutes ago

There are different ways of using AI. Experienced software developers can easily still test their "vibe coded" app for most common bugs.

BikiniPrince an hour ago

It’s all greenfield and I’m not surprised to see deprecation. Eventually tooling will distill into what works.

krm01 13 minutes ago

This has become the new standard, better get used to it. You have to stay on your feet no matter what technology you use. The time of picking one and sticking with it for years is long gone.

lionkor 4 minutes ago

> You have to stay on your feet no matter what technology you use

This was said about web technologies and crypto and every other hype cycle, and it's never been true at all. The vast majority of people are okay just picking something reasonable or a default, and sticking with it.

It's not difficult to imagine that pi.dev will be around in 10 years, and it's not difficult to imagine that vim, visual studio, vscode, linux and ext4 will still be around in 10 years.

I don't know what kind of massive innovation you see here. This is like flying cars; every couple years there's a demo of a flying car of some variety, some people immediately short mercedes, and 5 years later mercedes is still around, making slightly more modern cars than before.

If you really believe that the tech-news hype cycle reflects reality, I urge you to go solve an advent of code in a normal programming language, maybe that'll help get you back on track.

mi_lk 2 hours ago

When should I use this over Codex? Is this supposed to be called by other tools/agents?

imdsm 2 hours ago

Codex = agent harness

OpenAI CLI = wrapper around API

theanonymousone 2 hours ago

> wrapper around API

aka curl? :-/

BikiniPrince an hour ago

Curl with token usage so it’s better.

mohsen1 6 minutes ago

to be fair `gh` works so much better for me than crafting curl requests (even with LLMs)

NothingAboutAny an hour ago

that was my assumption, maybe you use Claude but want it to use OpenAI image generation or something. this got a physical shrug out of me.

albert_e 44 minutes ago

Does this consume the monthly flat rate subscription quota or API credits.

Does Anthropic have something similar.

I understand "claude -p" has been unreliable to use with subscription quota and often required "extra usage" credits.

hahahacorn 2 hours ago

I imagine the play is RL your model to solve problems using your own tools which it knows how to use most efficiently until it defaults to using services like managed agents, etc.

Honestly surprised this wasn't available sooner.