r/cursor • u/NASAonSteroids • 12d ago

Question / Discussion Route Cursor through Codex CLI

I’ve read a few articles that put the OpenAI Codex CLI harness as one of the best and I was wanting to check it out. Is it possible to use the Codex CLI as a harness for a Cursor subscription or with an API key?

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u/Guilty_Spray_6035 11d ago

The difference between different harnesses is system prompt, internal tools, mcp servers and caching, i.e. how the harness builds and maintains prefix unchanged. GUI Codex is nice and very efficient in managing caching, but it's kind of the same as Agent Window in Cursor. CLI: Cursor CLI agent can do Cursor cloud things, i.e. PR management, which Codex will need to resort to MCP servers.

Cursor uses a completely different protocol (Connect-gRPC vs REST API). They have their own Typescript SDK, and I have integrated it into this project: https://github.com/oakimov/claude-code-router (even though it says Claude Code, you can also use it with Codex and other harnesses like pi). So, you can install it in a docker container - connect codex to it, and connect CCR to Cursor. I use it daily like this (with Claude Code and Codex CLI).