Codex CLI compiled to WASM running in the browser
Details
- External ID
- 49362139
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Codex CLI compiled to WASM running in the browser
- Website domain
- browsercode.io
- Launched
- Aug. 19, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.12634408602150538
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
Description
Hi HN! As part of our ongoing work on BrowserPod, an in-browser WebAssembly sandbox, we have significantly expanded what the Rust WebAssembly target can achieve.Our approach proved so robust that we could get the whole Codex CLI (~1.25M lines of Rust, excluding dependencies) to run in the browser, with extremely minimal modifications.Now, Codex CLI by itself could not do much, but BrowserPod provides a full environment with standard Linux command line tools, bash, git, Node.js and Python, with more yet to come. All of these are compiled to WebAssembly and run concurrently on top of BrowserPod kernel.To learn more about our work on Rust and BrowserPod in general: https://labs.leaningtech.com/blog/browserpod-rust
Enrichment
- Theme
- browser automation and scraping for AI
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- codex cli in the browser via wasm
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Compiling a 1.25M line complex Rust CLI with system/network dependencies to WebAssembly to run in an in-browser sandbox requires deep browser WASI runtime virtualization and systems engineering.
What it would actually take: This requires building an in-browser virtual POSIX execution layer (virtual filesystem, network polyfills via WebSockets/WebRTC, threads via Web Workers/SharedArrayBuffer) and heavily patching crates that depend on native system calls. Achieving this level of compilation and execution needs expert low-level Rust and WASM runtime/compiler engineering.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: OpenAI
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 375 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #320 of 376 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 287 days after the earliest competitor.
- Firefox in WebAssembly · hn · 2026-07-15 · 273 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- NetWasm · hn · 2026-09-29 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Sandboxing untrusted code using WebAssembly · hn · 2026-02-03 · 76 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- codex-cli-dev.github.io · github · 2026-09-21 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- You can now run Gemini CLI in the browser · hn · 2026-04-30 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- BrowserCode · hn · 2026-05-07 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Waputer · hn · 2026-04-17 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Ferroterm · hn · 2026-07-05 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.45
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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