OpenAI picks up pace against Claude Code with new Codex desktop app
Today, OpenAI launched a macOS desktop app for Codex, its large language model-based coding tool that was previously used through a command line interface (CLI) on the web or inside an integrated development environment (IDE) via extensions.
By launching a desktop app, OpenAI is catching up to Anthropic's popular Claude Code, which already offered a macOS version. Whether the desktop app makes sense compared to the existing interfaces depends a little bit on who you are and how you intend to use it.
The Codex macOS app aims to make it easier to manage multiple coding agents in tandem, sometimes with parallel tasks running over several hours—the company argues that neither the CLI nor the IDE extensions are ideal interfaces for that.