Tools: Codex App Illustrates The Shift Left Of Ides And Coding Guis

The Codex desktop app doesn't change everything - but it's part of a larger trend worth paying attention to. Where IDEs are headed and why specs matter more than code.

No, it doesn’t. The Codex desktop app dropped yesterday. You’ll see breathless Twitter posts and YouTube videos about how it changes everything. It doesn’t. But it is pretty cool, and it’s part of a larger trend worth paying attention to. I’m going to talk briefly about how it’s changing my workflow, and then zoom out to what it means that this app exists at all.

I’ll write a longer post on this, but the quick version:

The TLDR: Codex app is OpenAI’s supported UI for multi-agent parallelized development. In my workflow, I use it to develop small features in parallel while I’m working on the main thing in Claude Code.

The reason I find this interesting isn’t the app itself, but what it says about where things are headed. I think about IDEs a lot because they’re a lens into where software development is going. I’ve said this before: software development will be unrecognizable in two to three years. And what’s happening with IDEs is proof.

“IDE” stands for integrated development environment. The name doesn’t imply it has to be about reading and writing code - but that’s what it’s always been. That’s changing.

Here’s the thing: I don’t read code anymore. I used to write code and read code. Now when something isn’t working, I don’t go look at the code. I don’t question the code. I either ask one of my coding agents, or - more often - I ask myself: what happened with my system? What can I improve about the inputs that led to that code being generated?

The code isn’t the thing I’m debugging. The system that produced the code is. The people really leading AI coding right now (and I’d put myself near the front, though not all the way there) don’t read code. They manage the things that produce code.

The image above illustrates how I think about this landscape. There’s a spectrum with three major zones: Code, Agents, and Specs. The further left you move, the higher up the stack you get.

Code (right side): Traditional IDEs. VS Code, JetBrains. You read code, you write code.

Source: HackerNews