> On (2), I do find myself consuming agents' gigantic text responses, writing 8-bullet-point responses to guide them, then iterating that way. It's pretty exhausting. I could see inline comments providing much better ergonomics.

For your 2 plannotator [1] has a nice way to annotate agent messages or documents and its integrated into the agent chat (codex app also adopted the pattern)

[1] https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator

Same pain point on (2). So I had codex build me a small macos sytem tray app that lets me comment on anything i can select on my screen with the source app and metadata plus my comments. Once commenting is done i can click a button to coppy all comment to the chat input, and voila ! But really something i hope that gets integrated into the codex app itself. The present way they made it is not super helpful.

The Codex desktop app lets you highlight anything in the transcript and add it to the chat as an annotation.

It's a solid experience so far (have been testing the alpha). Being able to work across model providers in parallel is my preference, rather than being stuck in Codex desktop, for example.