CodexDesk vs Poolside AI

Poolside's substance is the model family. Laguna XS 2.1 is 33B params with 3B active and a 256K context, explicitly built to run on-device for lightweight scenarios. Laguna S 2.1, released 2026-07-21, is 118B params, 8B active, 1M context, aimed at frontier-class long-horizon reasoning — the 8B-active design is the efficiency argument, not raw dense size. Around them, the Poolside Platform (2026-05-05) adds single- and multi-agent orchestration with planning and tool use, sandboxed execution for generated code, a desktop app and CLI, model selection and project management in the client, data connectors to repositories, databases and warehouses, RBAC for both humans and agents, end-to-end trace observability, and governance built for regulated environments. Integration surface is OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway.

CodexDesk has one idea, executed in Rust: run your agent session in a native desktop window instead of a browser tab or terminal. It claims cross-platform support, a clean modern interface, and a small footprint — the latter being the point of Rust over an Electron shell. Notable for what isn't there: no integrations listed, no model of its own (it's a surface for Codex-style workflows and AI coding agents you already use), no documented feature matrix or changelog, and no vendor behind it. Distribution is downloadable builds on GitHub Releases under MIT, with a public issue tracker as the only support path. Feature-for-feature it's a shell versus a platform; the comparison is really model-plus-governance versus window management.

CodexDesk's pricing is unambiguous and takes thirty seconds to establish: free, MIT-licensed, forkable, downloaded from GitHub Releases. Your cost is your own time — reading source, building, and self-supporting through a public issue tracker. There's no seat fee, no contract, and also no SLA, no vendor support, and no guaranteed release cadence. If you're on a resource-constrained machine and want a lightweight agent frontend, the price is effectively zero.

Poolside publishes no pricing at all. The pricing type is contact sales, and the product data explicitly notes there is no published per-seat tier — which the vendor's own "not for" guidance calls out as a problem for buyers who need a listed price before budget approval. Practically, that means procurement: a conversation, a quote, likely an enterprise agreement, and a procurement process to get through. The return on that friction is on-prem or air-gapped deployment, weights you can inspect and fine-tune, RBAC, audit trails and traces — the things that justify enterprise paperwork. If you're a solo developer or a small startup without an enterprise budget, this pricing model is a wall, not a hurdle. Note the 2026-08-22 Bloomberg report that Nvidia will pay Poolside a $6B license fee per an anonymous source — a signal of commercial weight, but it changes nothing about what you personally pay. Budget accordingly: one option costs your afternoon, the other costs a sales cycle.