Interesting to note that the reduced latency is not just due to the improved model speed, but also because of improvements made to the harness itself:
> "As we trained Codex-Spark, it became apparent that model speed was just part of the equation for real-time collaboration—we also needed to reduce latency across the full request-response pipeline. We implemented end-to-end latency improvements in our harness that will benefit all models [...] Through the introduction of a persistent WebSocket connection and targeted optimizations inside of Responses API, we reduced overhead per client/server roundtrip by 80%, per-token overhead by 30%, and time-to-first-token by 50%. The WebSocket path is enabled for Codex-Spark by default and will become the default for all models soon."
I wonder if all other harnesses (Claude Code, OpenCode, Cursor etc.,) can make similar improvements to reduce latency. I've been vibe coding (or doing agentic engineering) with Claude Code a lot for the last few days and I've had some tasks take as long as 30 minutes.
This might actually be hard for open source agents (e.g. Opencode) to replicate, barring a standardized WebSocket LLM API being widely adopted.