Inline Suggestions / Ghost Text for Codex vscode extension
What variant of Codex are you using?
Vscode IDE extension
What feature would you like to see?
Currently, I'm a huge fan of using 5.3 xhigh in Codex CLI to plan and make big changes.
Once a big change is made, I take a look and fix any aspects that weren't to my liking manually or with 5.3 spark.
When manually making changes, I love the ghost text inline suggestions copilot generates however due to my understanding copilot is using an outdated lightweight gpt model for inline suggestions and due to this, plenty of the suggestions are completely useless.
If the vscode extension could allow for these inline suggestions with lightweight models like 5.3 spark, I'd see no reason to spend money on any other agentic tools then what GPT pro gives you. So much bank for your buck.
Too conclude, the reason the feature would be huge is inline suggestions aren't going to lag behind the frontier models because they're implemented by copilot, instead plugging in a spark model that can consume my pro plan tokens would really help my workflow.
Additional information
_No response_
8 Comments
Thanks for the suggestion, but this isn't a direction we plan to go with Codex, so it's unlikely that we'd invest in this.
What you're describing here is "auto complete", an old-school concept that had use in the era of manual coding. Codex is designed to be an autonomous coding agent, which is where we see the future of coding.
If you want to manually write and edit code, there are existing tools like Github copilot that can help you with that.
I don't agree that an AI agent can 100% code everything. So some manual coding will be necessary. But having the AI agent be context aware and provide inline snips of code is a big time saver.
Github copilot removed their subscription. Now it is impossible to use it, even if you want to. So it is still needed.
One use case that I would add is when I'm writing SQL queries in Datagrip. I like having the ghost text, it's highly helpful. I won't be using the Codex agent / Claude Code to write all SQL queries to me then copy-paste them in the IDE, as that's too much YOLO (especially if it involves write operations).
Why bother supporting a VSCode extension at all then
This is an insane reply. I almost thought you are joking.. Inline complete/auto-complete or TAB/TAB/TAB, is very often used by engineers. Especially when users just are typing some code.
I can't believe that both Claude Code and Codex extension doesn't support auto-complete in VSCode.
I was heavily considering a Codex subscription after the Copilot pause/shutdown. This basic feature not being implemented is a dealbreaker to me, and your doubling down here is just delusional.
Why even support a VSCode extension? Isn't the concept of a code editor "old-school" to you?
Surprise, the era of manual coding is now.