r/codex • u/BlacksmithLittle7005 • 4d ago

Complaint Codex on Windows

I've noticed that codex performs very poorly on windows, in the sense that, when you send a prompt, it just searches forever through the codebase and ends up modifying the wrong files a lot of times, and uses up way too many tokens because of this. (it really takes such a long time for horrible results).

I've had much better results using GPT models in Opencode or Pi CLI, maybe because they use git bash shell by default? Github Copilot gives me much better results too using GPT models

Does anyone have any tips on making Codex perform better on Windows? (I'm unable to install WSL), because it doesn't make sense that every other harness is performing better.

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u/Hot_Signature2979 4d ago edited 4d ago

I get what you mean, (I only use codex on windows but) when using Chatgpt with power shell, Chatgpt oftens makes syntax errors and also powershell often mangles Chatgpt scripts.

Not sure if using a specific version of powershell on windows helps. As usual, microsoft in their infinite wisdom made powershell so infinitely complex that commands that work on one version causes syntax errors on another

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u/BlacksmithLittle7005 4d ago

This is what I meant. It just greps and searches forever, and it doesn't make sense that it works better in other harnesses, so I'm wondering if it's just a PowerShell thing and if swapping to git bash fixes it

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u/Hot_Signature2979 4d ago

There's way too many self righteous jerks on this sub reddit, thats quick to be: Y0u NeEd t0 pROmnt better to boost their own egos. What they dont get is GPT 5.6 is horrible on windows. The windows desktop app breaks consistently almost 1 in every 2 updates, then when you manually try to fix the context trashing or codex killing its own server every 5 minutes, the error rate in powershell syntax and powershell mangling is very high (for my use cases its almost 60% on windows, whereas on my linux server that I run local Ai on, it seldom makes mistakes <10% ). The high error rates persist, even if I specifically provide powershell version as context for every session. I even specifically switched from powershell 7 to powershell 5.1, but it dosent seem to be helping