Amp vs Codex CLI

Overview

Amp is a coding agent and development environment built for frontier models. Instead of keeping one chat in one editor, Amp gives every agent its own orb — an isolated environment that keeps working after you close your laptop. You can start a task, walk away, and check on it from the web or your phone while it continues in the background.

The product is aimed at developers who run several agents at once and want to stop juggling worktrees, terminals and browser tabs. Amp describes the shift as "juggle less, ship more": you direct a team of agents, share threads with teammates, and pick work back up from any device.

What Amp provides

• Orbs — always-on environments for agents. Each orb can run commands, edit code and keep state, and agents inside them continue after your local machine disconnects.
• Remote control — run amp --no-tui on servers, CI runners or any shell, then watch and steer those agents from the web UI or your phone.
• Threads and spaces — long-running conversations grouped into spaces so multiple agents and teammates can work on the same project without stepping on each other.
• Automations — agents can schedule themselves to wake up, check production metrics, compare canary results and report back without a human prompt.
• Production access with OIDC — orbs can be granted (and revoked) access to production systems such as Google Cloud, so an agent can read logs or verify a rollout.
• Team features — service accounts for threads that belong to the team rather than one person, plus sharing so colleagues can follow or take over work.
• Git hosting integrations — connect github.com, gitlab.com or a self-hosted GitLab instance; Amp can also host a repository for a new project and clone it with amp clone.
• Portals — open what an agent built on a remote runner directly from your browser, even when the code is not on your machine.
• Boxes — always-on computers for the things you build with Amp.

How people use it

Typical workflows include handing off a bug report and letting the agent reproduce, patch and test it; running performance rollouts where an agent watches dashboards and confirms a fleet-wide win; reviewing a diff and asking follow-up questions in the same thread; and letting an agent fix its own tooling or documentation when it hits a bad error message.

Amp is model-agnostic in practice — the agent can be pointed at different frontier models — and it exposes the same threads across the desktop app, CLI, web and mobile, so a task can start on one surface and finish on another.

Getting started

1. Create an account at ampcode.com and install the CLI or desktop app.
2. Run amp in a project directory, or use amp --no-tui on a remote machine.
3. Describe the task; the agent plans, edits files, runs commands and reports back.
4. Use the web or mobile view to steer long-running orbs, or open a portal to preview what was built.
5. For team work, move persistent threads into a space and use service accounts where the work should outlive an individual.

Pricing

Amp offers a free tier with limited daily usage plus paid credit plans for heavier agent use; team and enterprise options add shared spaces, service accounts and centralized billing. Check ampcode.com for current limits.

Links

• Website: ampcode.com
• Docs: ampcode.com/docs
• CLI remote control: ampcode.com/docs/cli/remote-control
• Changelog: ampcode.com/chronicle

Codex CLI is a coding agent from OpenAI that runs locally on your computer.
If you want Codex in your code editor (VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf), install in your IDE.
If you want the desktop app experience, run codex app or visit the Codex App page.
If you are looking for the cloud-based agent from OpenAI, Codex Web, go to chatgpt.com/codex.

Quickstart

Installing and running Codex CLI

Run the following on Mac or Linux to install Codex CLI:

curl -fsSL https://chatgpt.com/codex/install.sh | sh

Run the following on Windows to install Codex CLI:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://chatgpt.com/codex/install.ps1 | iex"

The standalone installers download from https://releases.openai.com/codex by default and fall back to GitHub Releases if a metadata or asset download is unavailable. To force GitHub Releases, set CODEX_INSTALLER_USE_RELEASES_OPENAI_COM to false (0 and no are also accepted):

curl -fsSL https://chatgpt.com/codex/install.sh | CODEX_INSTALLER_USE_RELEASES_OPENAI_COM=false sh

$env:CODEX_INSTALLER_USE_RELEASES_OPENAI_COM='false'; irm https://chatgpt.com/codex/install.ps1 | iex

Codex CLI can also be installed via the following package managers:

## Install using npm
npm install -g @openai/codex

## Install using Homebrew
brew install --cask codex

Then simply run codex to get started.

Using Codex with your ChatGPT plan

Run codex and select Sign in with ChatGPT. We recommend signing into your ChatGPT account to use Codex as part of your Plus, Pro, Business, Edu, or Enterprise plan. Learn more about what's included in your ChatGPT plan.

You can also use Codex with an API key, but this requires additional setup.

Docs

• Codex Documentation
• Contributing
• Installing & building
• Open source fund

This repository is licensed under the Apache-2.0 License.