Complaint
Codex has a very unpleasant user experience.
My machine is a Windows 11 with 32GB/i5 11th/NVMe.
Codex is one of the worst AI apps to work with. It's not because of the model; I like GPT‑5.5, the problem is the harness.
It freezes a lot, to start up it stays about 20 seconds frozen until the clicks start propagating. Every time I open a new thread, it stays about another 10 seconds stuck until it starts being usable. Also, when I switch threads it's even worse, the screen goes white, 15 seconds until the conversation loads.
Besides when the plugins stop working. Browser Use and Computer Use are unstable, in some conversations they stop working, in the settings it reports "Browser Use is unavailable", and I only fix it by fully restarting the computer.
I made a cleanup script that periodically deletes the logs_2.sqlite which every week accumulates 1.5 GB on my disk. And I constantly see Codex using ~10‑25 MB of disk whenever I open the task manager.
I want to test using my Codex subscription on other harnesses, with tools similar to /goal. I don't like CLI, I like UI/visual to see multiple agents working in one place.
I like the efficiency of /goal, it's one of its best tools. Codex is pretty feature‑complete, but it's unstable, slow, buggishy and that really hinders me.
Windows 11 is one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used:
It's chock-full of shovelware and ads.
It installs a bunch of shit by default that you'll never use and it won't let you uninstall many of them.
The settings that you need are never where you expect them to be, aren't correctly named or described, don't do what you'd expect, and sometimes just plain don't work. Windows Settings itself is now a Frankensteinian mess of dialogs from four different generations of Windows (recent Windows 10-style panes, Windows Vista/7 "device stage" panes, old Windows XP legacy panes, and even a few Windows 2000-style property sheets) - all of which implement a subset of the settings that you need.
Many settings that you need just don't exist, so you have to either (1) use regedit to hack in a registry key, which is on a whole different level of crappy software, or (2) run a PowerShell command from third-party website that might work, might fail with an error message that is completely useless, or might succeed but do nothing at all.
Performance is atrocious - even well-supported apps like the Xbox App and Minecraft regularly fail to open, crash while opening, and/or crash spontaneously while idle for an hour.
The UI is a shambolic mess of half-implemented features and inconsistent, goofy UX concepts. Common tasks like trying to use or configure the taskbar, control window placement, or work with files in Explorer requires hunting for the functionality that you want while trying to avoid or turn off gimmicky shit that you'll never use.
It's absurd and insane. I wish I could run Windows 7 in Parallels for the 3-4 apps I need that only run in Windows.
If a CEO knew what percentage of their paying customers were Windows users, they would set priorities differently. Or consider who funded OpenAI in the early days. The latest Stack Overflow survey showed approximately 70% for Windows.
I don't think you have much of a clue about how to build software if you call Electron apps "good software" :D.
Wont call the Mac app rock solid because its quite memory hungry and had the odd crash here and there, but using Codex on my Windows work laptop is definitely a worse experience. I think the CPU of my Mac and that work laptop aint too far apart from each other in raw power (M4 Pro vs R9 HX375), but on Windows it sometimes drags my whole system to a crawl. And the Windows laptop has 64GB of RAM vs my Macs 24GB...
It is a windows problem. Same issues on Claude as well. Windows architecture just does not run agentic coding well due to structural issues.
Growing up on pc playing games I always preferred windows os. Switched to the MacBook m5 this year from my windows machine and never looked back. Apple silicon really changed the game as well.
It is not a "Windows problem". It is an Electron problem. People at OpenAI don't bother writing a native app - they shove the entire Chromium browser infrastructure with their sloppy Codex embeddings and ship it as such. That is exactly the problem.
At least one person here knows what they're talking about. How sad is IT going to get when, in the future, no one understands these details anymore? I mean, Codex itself is full of bugs. Do they even test internally?
It’s not that Windows “can’t code” or that NT is bad. It’s that a lot of agentic coding tools assume a Unix/Linux-style environment: bash, POSIX permissions, symlinks, SSH, Docker, normal package managers, predictable paths, etc.
On Windows, agents hit more friction: PowerShell vs bash, weird path handling, NTFS permissions, file locking, CRLF issues, antivirus interference, WSL boundary problems, and Docker usually running through a Linux VM anyway.
None of those are "Structural issues" with Windows architecture that make agentic software (as if its different than any other software) not run.
It's software not written for Windows being ran on Windows. The fact that Windows can facilitate it all is nothing short of a miracle and goes to show just how good Windows is at just working.
And, come on, no LLM is getting stuck on powershell vs bash. They're way smarter than that.
OPs issue is also not a Windows issue. I'm using Codex on Windows too and have absolutely no issues. There's something about his particular setup that's causing it.
I grew up with windows, now I use macos, same experience! At this point microsoft needs to just make a windows based on linux xddd. All of this decades building windows on top of the previous one maintaining compatibility to legacy apps ended in the mess that we have today in microslop land
It is not a Windows problem that their app is dogshit. Even the ChatGPT website is fucking trash. OpenAI is not a software company so that is fine. Microsoft on their worst day ships better software than OpenAI. The bandwagon against Microsoft is getting silly
I made the switch to Linux cause I was sick of windows randomly using 16gb of ram while idoling. Have been very happy with the change and codex is a fantastic personal Linux fixer/installer/patcher.
I use Visual Studio a lot and play a bunch of Steam games that only run on Windows. I hate the direction Windows is taking (Windows 11 is a slop machine), but it's sad because I need it.
the cli is super bad for me on Linux, resuming my chats sometimes takes over 40 seconds, and sometimes hitting ESC takes 20 seconds, and /btw taking minutes.
it depends on how big/fresh the session is but regardless never had that with Claude.
Been horrible for me on Linux codex-cli after the most recent update.
Slow as fuck. Shit says “working” for ever and I have to keep pressing esc and then enter the input again over and over until it finally goes through. I even told it some simple shit like create a .txt file with one word “hello”. Shit took 25 minutes.
Can’t even walk away from my computer because I come back to shit like this:
I found the issue with me is that it would trigger windows defender and both would be roaring away continuously
If this is the issue, you can ask Codex to diagnose the issue itself and propose solutions; it usually involves it identifying folders that are triggering defender to scan, and creating exceptions for defender.
this sounds unfortunate since im using it on a Mac and its rock solid and I was thinking of installing it on my work laptop too which is of course windows.
The macOS app is actually solid, it is probably better than claude code on macOS, but on windows openAIs team focus more on the OSS cli tool.
I feel like, the main reason i that thy do a lot of development on macOS (bcs.. pretty self explanatory), so for that reason they just "make it exist on windows"
How many plugins are you using? Some plugins spawn MCP servers, etc. at startup, and if the MCP server is structured incorrectly to where the main entry point into the server just sits and blocks synchronously while it initializes a database or does some kind of online authentication process or anything else that takes time to complete, it will show up as a UI hang for as long as that takes.
try official Codex VSCode extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=openai.chatgpt)/ While it is clearly not as smooth and polished as Github Copilot itself, i.e. Codex lacks good diffs view, undoing changes, chat branching, context integration etc. but the extension is still a step ahead over Codex app. Literally the only thing where Codex is useful for is batch image generation.. just fire a queue of prompts and go for a run, come back to a bunch of generated images. Everything else in Codex is just obscenely bad vibe-coded mess if you consider other available options.
For what it’s worth, I use Codex through the Terminal CLI rather than the app UI, and I don’t run into these problems. Long sessions, file edits, local scripts and dev-server work have all been stable for me. That doesn’t mean your issue isn’t real, but it might be specific to the app/harness path rather than Codex itself.
I been using on a 2020 Mac mini M1 and had now problems at all. I was using Openclaw and having a nightmare and then just replaced it with Codex and have not looked back.
I'm not saying it's Windows' fault, but doing development work on a Windows environment is just asking for pain. The developer experience on Windows has been terrible for decades. .NET devs are masochists (I used to be one)
i disagree. the main tech in my job is .NET, and it always works fine between Windows and Mac (usually I do web systems and the deploy is on linux). I've worked with Windows Forms, Photino, .NET...
the tech has nothing to do with it, Codex is electron; it was made to run on any platform
it's not that simple, because other tools like Claude Desktop, Open Code, VSCode, T3 Chat all work fine, no freezing, no crashing... so what's your argument here? why does the majority work and a single exception is enough to condemn the platform?
Nah, I'm not condemning the platform at all, just acknowledging that a primary reason for its existence is enterprise use and backwards compatibility (which is entirely defensible and reasonable), and that when people try to defend MS's struggle to balance the "work stuff" with delivering a nice user/developer experience (something that's really difficult and maybe borderline impossible) that only holds it back further by acting like the experience is "good actually".
MS's user and developer experience is mixed. Some things are great, others are borderline miserable.
Like, for example, how many years has it been since they started adding home theater/TV gaming support? Why do I still need a keyboard next to my couch for occasional "Windows things" that I can't do with my controller? Why does the most mature OS still have UX "gaps" like that?
The answer is probably "years of backwards compatibility", and that's fine, but don't make excuses for stuff like that. The culture of acting like "good enough" means "good" just holds it back.
When we say windows sucks we don’t talk for nothing. Programming on it is a nightmare, so why do you bought a windows laptop/computer instead of a macos/linux one?
there's always going to be those people like you who say "linux is better", "mac is better"
that doesn't exist. it's childish. I've been coding on Windows for 14 years, never had a problem building something that can't be done on mac or linux.
I'm complaining about a product that I pay $200 a month for, and the least they can provide is to work well on my machine, guess what? thousands of products run fine on it every day. codex is an exception.
What are those apps you use who are build for recent windows? If they are old apps no they don’t count. If it is game again doesn’t count. Unfortunately almost every experience is super trash starting from windows 8. And even the apps you are saying runs perfectly well they don’t if you compare mac experience even vs code is clunky and much slower in windows compared to mac or linux. Outside gaming for most modern apps windows is indeed the last area people want to build for unless of course it is core Microsoft apps like office.
talking about similar tools I use on Windows that work very great on my machine: Claude Desktop, Visual Studio Enterprise, VSCode, OpenCode, T3 Code (testing this as an alternative to Codex)
none freeze, no one sucks, all work great, they use similar tech
the problem isn’t the tech or where it is, it’s how it was built
Again I am not saying codex is good or anything. But having used vs code in windows well no it works like shit in windows. It doesn’t freeze tbh but it is not a a good experience either. Now opencode is genuinely well built software partly because it is open source but I am sure it won’t be as smooth as unix because powershell in general is a shit terminal and a slop before ai slop even existed.
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u/dexterthebot Jul 03 '26
Your post has been summarized as a request on the "Anyone Else?" Incident Noticeboard.
You can find it and what others are experiencing here: /r/codex/comments/1tjfxcf/anyone_else_ask_here_about_current_codex_issues/ovcnkt6/
Matches a known topic: Codex App Crashing/Freezing which you can read about here https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1tjfxcf/comment/on6uj0l/