An honest review of the Codex CLI coding agent.

💬 Topics:
- Working with coding agents;
- Codex and Chat GPT review;
- Building an app with Codex;
- Are programmers obsolete?
- The future of software development.

Awesome Coding's resource offer curated lists of resources, tools, and libraries for software developers. Readers can learn about programming languages, frameworks, and development tools across various domains. With carefully selected recommendations and community contributions, Awesome Coding helps developers discover new tools and resources to enhance their productivity and skills.

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A developer spent two days testing OpenAI's Codex agent and GPT-5 model by building a Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym management app from scratch. While the AI successfully scaffolded a Spring Boot backend with minimal issues, it struggled with nuanced decisions and generated poor-quality React Native code requiring extensive refactoring. The experiment revealed that AI coding tools can accelerate development but require deep technical knowledge to evaluate and fix generated code, often producing suboptimal solutions that create maintenance debt. The final app was functional but took 20 hours of active prompting and fixing, raising questions about cost scalability and the true value proposition of AI coding assistants.

I actually tried AI coding and it's worse than I thought...

Exactly! If the user is not knowledgeable of the tech the AI is using, then it will take them longer to ship the product. Imagine getting bugs for over 3 hours where in fact the only solution is just one line change. That’s the tradeoff AI gives. It’s not about code generation speed. It was always about the overall system, logic, and decision-making that makes software developers irreplaceable.
Experience and fundamentals is the deal breaker here. Without real dev guidance, it will just be nothing more than a slop. Sure it can patch up a working app but the trust would still be quite low since AI is notorious for hallucinating and even exposing security risks.

AI saves time… as long as you don’t count the time spent fixing AI code.

I recently learned about Gastown. The answer is always “more AI”.