OpenAI Codex CLI: The AI Terminal Revolution
OpenAI quietly dropped a bomb: an open-source AI-powered CLI that understands natural language.
Installation
npm install -g @openai/codex-cli
codex auth
What Can It Do?
Natural Language Commands
$ codex "find all JavaScript files modified in the last week"
# Executes: find . -name "*.js" -mtime -7
$ codex "compress all images in this folder to 80% quality"
# Executes: for img in *.{jpg,png}; do convert "$img" -quality 80 "$img"; done
Complex Operations
$ codex "set up a new Next.js project with TypeScript, Tailwind, and Prisma"
# Creates project, installs deps, configures everything
$ codex "find and kill the process using port 3000"
# Executes: lsof -ti:3000 | xargs kill -9
Git Workflows
$ codex "create a branch for the login feature, commit my changes, and push"
# Handles the entire git workflow
$ codex "show me what changed since the last release"
# Generates a beautiful diff summary
Safety Features
Codex CLI has intelligent safeguards:
- Preview mode: Shows commands before execution
- Sandboxing: Dangerous operations require confirmation
- Rollback: Tracks changes for easy undo
$ codex "delete all node_modules folders"
⚠️ This will delete 47 directories. Continue? [y/N]
My Favorite Use Cases
- DevOps automation: "Deploy to staging and run smoke tests"
- Data processing: "Convert this CSV to JSON and upload to S3"
- System admin: "Check disk usage and clean up files over 100MB"
- Learning: "Explain what this bash script does"
The Catch
It requires an OpenAI API key and uses GPT-4 under the hood. Costs can add up for heavy users, but there's a local mode with Ollama support.
Verdict
This is the future of CLI. Natural language is becoming the universal interface.