Not sure what the goal is with Codex CLI. It's not running a local LLM right, just a CLI to make API calls from the terminal?

This might be their answer to claude code more than anything else.

Yes, that's exactly what I thought as well. An attempt to get more share in the developer tooling space for the long term.

Looks more like a direct competitor to Aider.

Where do I find out more about Aider ?

Just wait a few seconds and there will be a post here with Aider benchmarks for the new model, or https://aider.chat