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App$$$Cheap: Roughly under $50, or under $15/month.OpenAI

Codex

OpenAI's coding agent, run from a terminal rather than an editor

A coding agent from OpenAI that lives in a terminal. You describe the change in plain English, and it reads the codebase, edits files, runs commands and reports what it did. People reach for it on stubborn bugs, or point it at a pull request and let it argue with whatever wrote the code.

Who backs it

Sorted by strength of stance

  • Apple writer · founder of MacStories

    Built the Apple Frames command line tool with Codex and Claude Code, and says plainly that he is not a programmer by trade. He puts it at about a year of making small personal tools with coding agents before one of them felt worth releasing.

    Source: MacStories: Introducing Apple Frames 4
  • Angel investor · AngelList and the Naval podcast

    He started on Claude Code and brought in Codex for the thornier bugs and the deeper problems. It sits in his review loop too: push a branch and Codex fires automatically on the pull request alongside the other agents. That roundtable helps less than it sounds like it should, he says, because the models mostly agree.

    Source: nav.al: A Return to Code

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App entry · notes paraphrased from cited sources, quoted excerpts copied from the transcript they link to. Not medical advice. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by anyone listed. How this works.