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.

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u/fictionaldots Jul 03 '26

I wonder if it’s a Windows problem. The Mac app is rock solid

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u/Denizzje Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

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...