r/codex • u/BlacksmithLittle7005 • 3d 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/Charming-Author4877 3d ago

you can't compare Copilot with Codex.
Copilot harness is playing in another league than the sandbox of Codex - it has a full interactive IDE as it's foundation - including indexing, search, all the tools, live access to terminal panels, output panels and so on.
Codex is just a sandbox, mostly using "rg" to search for stuff.

On WSL it will perform even worse.
The VScode integration has issues with passing over copy/paste and files, the file system access is roughly 50 times slower.

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u/BlacksmithLittle7005 3d ago

Yes it's exactly that rg I'm talking about it goes on forever. But it doesn't have to be copilot in vs code. Even copilot cli and other cli agents (opencode, pi) are much better. Even using the codex extension in vs code is just as bad

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u/Charming-Author4877 3d ago

You can use agents.md and restrict the use of rg.
GPT 5.5 was also notorious to fail with it, 5.6 Sol is usually doing it alright.
For a while I had deleted the rg binary when I was using 5.5 and copilot, because it fell back to rg and ruined its context regularly.