Welcome to the show everybody!
I'm Ethan Park, here with Maya.
And first off, we have to give a quick shout-out and thank you to Jellypod for
supporting the show.
Now, Maya, let's look at something that caught my eye in the latest Codex upstream
cleanup.
PR number 27801.
They completely ripped out the WebRTC-based real-time voice and dictation system
from the Codex TUI.
It's just gone.
Wait, they completely deleted it?
So the actual `/realtime` session command and all those audio options in `/settings`
are just...
wiped from the terminal interface?
Completely wiped.
If you try to run `/realtime` now, you'll get an error.
The main driver here was streamlining the binary footprint.
WebRTC brings a massive amount of overhead, and shipping those heavy media libraries
inside a terminal-focused CLI tool was starting to look like a massive case of
feature creep.
I mean, that actually makes a lot of sense.
WebRTC is notorious for bloating binaries.
But if you're a developer who actually used native terminal-first dictation with
your own API keys, this is a pretty abrupt breaking change.
What are they supposed to do now?
The official recommendation is to shift those workflows over to the visual desktop
application-the `codex app`-which is better suited to handle heavy media pipelines.
Or, if you absolutely must stay in the terminal, you have to route your voice input
through native operating system dictation utilities instead.
Right, so instead of Codex handling the microphone stream, you let macOS or Windows
do the heavy lifting of speech-to-text at the system level,
and just feed the plaintext into the terminal.
It's less integrated, but honestly, it keeps the terminal client lean.
Exactly.
And that brings us to the latest
0.140.0-alpha.15 hotfixes,
which really show this strategic shift toward tightening the CLI's core competency
around raw text and tool execution.
For starters, they had to roll back a buggy URL parser that broke clickable terminal
paths containing tildes.
Oh, the tilde regression!
That must have been incredibly annoying.
If you can't click a relative path like `~/projects/src` because the parser
doesn't recognize the tilde, your terminal-to-editor navigation completely breaks.
Precisely.
It was a major papercut for developer velocity, so rolling that back in alpha 15 is
a welcome fix.
Along with that, they've also improved how code-mode web search handles nested tool
calls.
It now returns highly optimized plaintext context.
Ah, so instead of dumping raw HTML or heavily formatted markdown that bloats the
LLM's context window, it strips all the noise out?
Yes, exactly.
It prevents context window bloat by keeping the payload strictly to clean,
relevant plaintext.
It really shows where their focus is.
They are offloading the heavy media components like voice to the desktop app,
and hyper-focusing the terminal CLI on what it does best: fast,
low-overhead text manipulation and precise tool execution.
It's a classic Unix philosophy move.
Do one thing and do it well.
Let the desktop app be the heavy, multi-modal playground, and keep our terminal fast
and dependable.
Couldn't agree more.
That is all the time we have for this quick take.
Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you in the next one.
See ya!