alt Hacker News(Someone deleted a comment about why you'd want a mobile Codex app. This is the answer I wrote.)
Once you've used these coding agents a lot, you develop a pretty intuitive feel for how they work, what they're capable of, what they're good at, and where their weaknesses are. Hopefully, you're already pretty familiar with the code base you're working on. Combining the two, this means you can get quite far essentially "vibe coding" (i.e. not looking at the actual code) on a new branch.
So if you have some idea or some issue you want to fix on the go, you just iterate with the agent for a bit (presumably no more than a couple hours) until the agent outputs an implementation. Here, I do claim there is some "skill" (which is a function of your codebase familiarity, general SWE ability, and facility with AI agents), and if you're good, this implementation will be halfway decent a high percentage of the time. Then when you're back at your desktop, you can review the changes carefully/do some proper testing/debugging etc. But you've saved a good chunk of time- an initial draft is already waiting for you.
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But what if the code is on my laptop? Alongside the tools needed to work with it
Case in point, I have a Rust project with a target/ directory with about 10GB. Compile times from scratch takes about 10 minutes. (I do not love this)
With this mobile app I need to upload the code to the cloud, right? Or does OpenAI expects me to compile huge projects on my phone?
I've been vibe-refactoring a fork of get-shit-done (a skill collection for coding agents) for about the past week. I've had to revisit the same ideas multiple times because the agent doesn't always get it right at first, but it's still so much faster than I could have been at the same work + it's already mostly working (I've been dogfooding it for a day or two now). And I have gotten by just bringing up issues I notice from the LLM's implementation comments, rather than actually inspecting the code even once so far.
(The refactor's been to support Jujutsu VCS.)
> i.e. not looking at the actual code
You must be kidding me.
For major new features on my SaaS this is exactly what I do on my phone/laptop sometimes over days or weeks. I never look at the code until I get a feeling that it's far enough along and then I will hop into the actual code and start manually making changes or using CC locally to make the changes iteratively over weeks until it's ready for release. In the early stages of a major new feature/product it can be counterproductive to closely monitor the AI. Of course like you said in your comment this requires very very strong knowledge of the code base and a lot of experience with using the agents in the first place. But once you can do this sort of workflow it's very powerful because you can do this in parallel with other work (just an hour or two per day over a week or two on your phone can get you to a really good first draft even on a major new feature/product. And of course I'm not saying it's ready for production that can still take weeks but that's not really the point)