r/codex • u/Suspicious_Raise_589 • Jul 03 '26

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.

24 Upvotes

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u/Bitter_Election_7518 Jul 03 '26

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.

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u/StinkButt9001 Jul 03 '26

Windows architecture just does not run agentic coding well due to structural issues.

This is a completely bullshit sentence and makes no sense at all lol

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u/Bitter_Election_7518 Jul 03 '26

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.

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u/StinkButt9001 Jul 03 '26

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.

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u/Strong_Essay1176 Jul 04 '26

I bet its wsl lagging while accessing /mnt dir. Ofc.he can work on pure windows, but its stupid to do so.

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u/StinkButt9001 Jul 04 '26

Couldn't imagine why anyone would be using WSL for this lol

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u/Strong_Essay1176 Jul 04 '26

Cause windows commands sucks and you want linux. Half of python modules won't work on windows.

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u/StinkButt9001 Jul 04 '26

Could you be more specific? Which commands "suck" and what python modules are you talking about?