I went with Phi as the default model because, after some testing, I was honestly surprised by how high the quality was relative to its size and speed. The responses felt better in some reasoning tasks-but were running on way less hardware.

What really convinced me, though, was the focus on the kinds of tasks I actually care about: multi-step reasoning, math, structured data extraction, and code understanding.There’s a great Microsoft paper on this: "Textbooks Are All You Need" and solid follow-ups with Phi‑2 and Phi‑3.

agreed - thought the qwen2.5-coder was kind of standard non-reasoning small line of coding models right now

fair jab - haha; if we’re gonna go small, might as well go fully local and open. At least with phi-4-mini you don’t need an API key, and you can tweak/replace the model easily

i think this was made before that PR was merged into codex.

Does it work for local though? It's my understanding this is still missing.

   1. You still have to manually set up and run your own inference server (e.g., with ollama, lmstudio, vllm, etc.).
   2. You need to ensure that the model you choose works well with Codex's pre-defined prompt setup and configuration.
   3. Prompting patterns for small open-source models (like phi-4-mini) often need to be very different - they don't generalize as well.
   4. The function calling format (or structured output) might not even be supported by your local inference provider.

   - Write the tool specifically to run _locally_ out of the box, no inference API server required.
   - Use model directly (currently for phi-4-mini via llama-cpp-python).
   - Optimize the prompt and execution logic _per model_ to get the best performance.

That's a really old model now. Even the old Qwen 2.5 coder 32b model is better than DSv2

Thanks so much!

Was the model too big to run locally?

That’s one of the reasons I went with phi-4-mini - surprisingly high quality for its size and speed. It handled multi-step reasoning, math, structured data extraction, and code pretty well, all on modest hardware. Phi-1.5 / Phi-2 (quantized versions) also run on raspberry pi as others have demonstrated.

      OpenAI rejected the request. Error details: Status: 400, Code: unknown, Type: api_error, Message: 400
    registry.ollama.ai/library/phi4:latest does not support tools. Please verify your settings and try again.

Sorry, does that mean I can use anthropic and gemini with codex? And switch during the session?

I believe anon-kode is a decompiled Claude Code, so it should work identically when paired with Claude.

Hey, that is a very good question, I have answered that before. I hope you don't mind, if I simply copy paste my previous answer:

Technically you can use the original Codex CLI with a local LLM - if your inference provider implements the OpenAI Chat Completions API, with function calling, etc. included.

But based on what I had in mind - the idea that small models can be really useful if optimized for very specific use cases - I figured the current architecture of Codex CLI wasn't the best fit for that. So instead of forking it, I started from scratch.

Here's the rough thinking behind it:

   1. You still have to manually set up and run your own inference server (e.g., with ollama, lmstudio, vllm, etc.).
   2. You need to ensure that the model you choose works well with Codex's pre-defined prompt setup and configuration.
   3. Prompting patterns for small open-source models (like phi-4-mini) often need to be very different - they don't generalize as well.
   4. The function calling format (or structured output) might not even be supported by your local inference provider.

Codex CLI's implementation and prompts seem tailored for a specific class of hosted, large-scale models (e.g. GPT, Gemini, Grok). But if you want to get good results with small, local models, everything - prompting, reasoning chains, output structure - often needs to be different. So I built this with a few assumptions in mind:

   - Write the tool specifically to run _locally_ out of the box, no inference API server required.
   - Use model directly (currently for phi-4-mini via llama-cpp-python).
   - Optimize the prompt and execution logic _per model_ to get the best performance.

Instead of forcing small models into a system meant for large, general-purpose APIs, I wanted to explore a local-first, model-specific alternative that's easy to install and extend — and free to run.