> Would you classify Plandex as more similar to a terminal interface like Claude Code? Also it looks like Open AI released a similar terminal based tool today. https://github.com/openai/codex

Yes, I would say Plandex is generally similar in spirit to both Claude Code and OpenAI's new Codex tool. All three are agentic coding tools with a CLI interface.

A couple areas where I think Plandex can have an edge:

- Most importantly, it's almost never the case these days that a single provider offers the best models across the board for coding. Instead, each provider has their strengths and weaknesses. By slotting in the best model for each role, regardless of provider, Plandex is able to get the best of all worlds. For example, it currently uses Sonnet 3.7 by default for planning and coding, which by most accounts is still the best coding model. But for the narrow task of file edits, o3-mini offers drastically better speed, cost, and overall results. Similarly, if you go above Sonnet 3.7's context limit (200k tokens), Plandex can seamlessly move you over to a Gemini model.

- It offers some unique features, like writing all changes to a sandbox by default instead of directly to project files, that in my experience make a big difference for getting usable results and not leaving behind a mess by accident. I won't list all the features again here, but if you go through the README, I think you'll find a number of capabilities are quite helpful and aren't offered by other tools.

> Do you see an obvious distinctions or pros/cons between the terminal tools and the IDE systems?

I'm a Cursor subscriber and I use both Cursor and Plandex regularly for different kinds of tasks. For me, Cursor works better for smaller, more localized changes, while Plandex offers a better workflow for tasks that involve many steps, many files, or need many attempts to figure out the right prompt (since Plandex has more robust version control). I think once you are editing many files in one go, the IDE tab-based paradigm starts to break down a bit and it can become difficult to keep a high level perspective on everything that's changing.

Also, I'd say the terminal is naturally a better fit for executing scripts, installing dependencies, running tests and so on. It has your environment already configured, and it's able to control execution in a much more structured and reliable way. Plandex, for example, can tentatively apply a bunch of pending changes to your project, execute an LLM-generated script, and then roll back everything if the script fails. It's pretty hard to achieve that kind of low-level process control from an IDE.