It is well documented that I have nothing but the utmost respect for tiny customizable keyboards. I have not only built my own — soldering diodes and flashing tweaked firmware — but I’ve tweaked silkscreens and ordered PCBs. I use custom sculpted keycaps printed out of nylon. I know ball, and that’s why I find OpenAI’s little macropad to be tacky, annoying, overpriced and frankly laughable.
You can just make (expensive) things.
The Codex Micro is a macropad that costs $230 and is only useful if using a mouse and keyboard to talk to ChatGPT was too much work for you. If you don’t know how much a custom macropad costs, the answer is not usually two hundred and thirty dollars. Custom keyboard firmware like ZMK and QMK has been standardized for quite some time now, and there’s countless DIY and commercial offerings from Etsy sellers, products you can get at Micro Center, and random Aliexpress vendors that can be mapped to basically anything. Keychron has a macropad for 65 bucks that is pleasant looking and isn’t designed specifically to talk to one evil, imagination-killing program. Even outside of keyboards specifically, Logitech’s Stream Deck series is fairly affordable and has been hacked inside and out to meet whatever need you could imagine.
Both of these I respect way more. The Stream Deck is arguably the best product Elgato has ever made. Credit: Keychron, Elgato
The Codex Micro, on the other hand, is a 11 key macropad that looks like some rich kid shit from six years ago. It has those scooped, low profile chiclet-style keycaps that I have never liked. Stylistically, it reminds me of stuff that RAMA WORKS used to make before that specific company and the market for keyboards that cost more than four hundred dollars saturated fully and collapsed in on itself. The pad says “let’s build” on the bottom and “you can just build things” on the right which feels both redundant and increasingly like a bad stereotype of a Bay Area guy who has lobotomized himself with a chatbot and can only speak in memes and internet aphorisms. The top half of the keys are clear and the bottom are white with symbols. It looks kinda bad, like they couldn’t decide between two different keycap types and split the difference.
The Codex Micro is designed by a company called Work Louder, which has a respectable Instagram following. That makes sense, because their stuff looks like it’s designed for influencers. They actually have similar macropads called the Creator Micro and Micro Pro, the latter of which has a stated price of 199 dollars, although it’s discounted slightly at the time of writing this. I’ve not personally touched their products because I have plenty of keyboards and almost exclusively use splits, but a quick search of Reddit results here does not inspire confidence.
Man there's so many good keyboards you can get for that much money.
If this was just an overpriced macropad I could ignore it, but this is a peripheral for talking to AI and insulting to me personally. Like Teenage Engineering and the Rabbit r1, it’s a product that burns the credibility of its collaborators simply by existing. People who are into keyboards often live intentional lifestyles, tweaking their layout for irregular shortcuts hidden under obtuse layers. The whole point of customizing a keyboard is to be specific with your inputs, not having a big sloppy button that lets you talk to an LLM. This is a device that is narrowly aimed when it could be open, expensive when it could be affordable, and all in the service of something that is poisoning my other hobbies. It is the opposite of what I want by every measurable metric.
This is a product meant for Twitter Blue Checks and Bay Area cultists with too much money and not enough taste, people who would happily let Instagram decide every detail of their life if they could. I’ve seen the inside of their apartments and lives and they are dull, derivative and lacking in any considered choices. Maybe this thing feels good in your hand. Maybe the fit and finish looks impressive in person. I’ll never know. It’s the Devil’s sloppad, and frankly that alone makes it look like shit to me.
