[HN Gopher] Codex vs. Claude Code (today)
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Codex vs. Claude Code (today)
Author : gmays
Score : 72 points
Date : 2025-12-26 12:22 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (build.ms)
(TXT) w3m dump (build.ms)
| N_Lens wrote:
| A lot of (carefully hedged) pro Codex posts on HN read suspect to
| me. I've had mixed results with both CC and Codex and these kinds
| of glowing reviews have the air of marketing rather than
| substance.
| thedelanyo wrote:
| Exactly my thoughts. Most of these posts are what I'll say
| "paid posts".
| pitched wrote:
| The usage limits on Claude have been making it too hard to
| experiment with. Lately, I get about an hour a day before
| hitting session/weekly limits. With Codex, the limits are
| higher than my own usage so I never see them.
|
| Because of that, everyone who is new to this will be focused on
| Codex and write their glowing reviews of the current state of
| AI tools in that context.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| For what it's worth I just switched from claude code to codex
| and have found it to be incredibly impressive.
|
| You can check my history to confirm I criticize sama far too
| much to be an OpenAI shill.
| mold_aid wrote:
| Yeah. I can excuse bad writing, I can tolerate evangelism. I
| don't have patience for both.
| mergesort wrote:
| As the author of the post I think it was a nice quick post to
| share my perspective of a behavior I've been seeing across
| many (but not all) developers recently, but I'm always open
| to feedback for how to improve my writing!
|
| And as I mentioned here
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46392900) I have no
| affiliation with any of the organizations, nor care to
| evangelize any of them. Nobody pays me to write, I'm just a
| guy on the internet sharing his thoughts, building software,
| and teaching people how to use AI better with any tool people
| want to use. :)
| baq wrote:
| I've been using frontier Claude and GPT models for a loooong
| time (all of 2025 ;)) and I can say anecdotally the post is
| 100% correct. GPT codex given good enough context and harness
| will just go. Claude is better at interactive develop-test-
| iterate because it's much faster to get a useful response, but
| it isn't as thorough and/or fills in its context gaps too
| eagerly, so needs more guidance. Both are great tools and
| complement each other.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| If only fair comparisons would not be so costly, in both time
| and money.
|
| For example, I have a ChatGPT and a Gemini subscription, and
| thus could somewhat quickly check out their products, and I
| have looked at a lot of the various Google AI dev ventures, but
| I have not yet found the energy/will to get more into Gemini
| CLI specifically. Antigravity with Gemini 3 pro did some really
| wonky stuff when I tried it.
|
| I also have a Windsurf subscription, which allows me to look at
| any frontier model for coding (well, most of the time, unless
| there's some sort of company beef going). This I have often
| used to check out Anthropic models, with much less success than
| Codex with > GPT-5.1 - but of course, that's without using
| Clode Caude (which I subscribed to for a month, idk, 6 months
| ago, and seemed fine back then but not mind blowingly so).
|
| Idk! Codex (mostly using the vscode extension) works really
| well for me right now, but I would assume this is simply true
| across the board: Everything has gotten so much better. If I
| had to put my finger on what feels best about codex right now,
| specifically: Least amount of oversights and mistakes when
| working on gnarly backend code, with the amount of steering I
| am willing to put into it, mostly working off of 3-4 paragraph
| prompts.
| mergesort wrote:
| Heya, I'm the author! I can promise you that I am 0% affiliated
| with OpenAI and have no qualms with calling them out for the
| larger moral, ethical, and societal questions that have emerged
| with the strategy they've pushed.
|
| I do earnestly believe their models are currently the best to
| work with as software developers, but as I state in my post I
| think this is the state of the world today and have no
| premonition for that being true forever.
|
| Same questions apply to Anthropic, Google, etc, etc -- I'm not
| paid by anyone to say anything.
| willaaam wrote:
| This blog post lacks almost any form of substance.
|
| It could've been shortened to: Codex is more hands off, I
| personally prefer that over claude's more hands-on approach.
| Neither are bad. I won't bring you proof or examples, this is
| just my opinion based on my experience.
| deepdarkforest wrote:
| > Codex is more hands off, I personally prefer that over
| claude's more hands-on approach
|
| Agree, and it's a nice reflection of the individual companie's
| goals. OpenAI is about AGI, and they have insane pressure from
| investors to show that that is still the goal, hence codex when
| works they could say look it worked for 5 hours! Discarding
| that 90% of the time it's just pure trash.
|
| While Anthropic/Boris is more about value _now_ , more
| grounded/realistic, providing more consistent hence
| trustable/intuitive experience that you can steer. (Even if
| Dario says the opposite). The ceiling/best case scenario of a
| claude code session is a bit lower than Codex maybe, but less
| variance.
| dworks wrote:
| Well, if you had tried using GPT/Codex for development you
| would know that the output from those 5 hours would not be
| 90% trash, it would be close to 100% pure magic. I'm not
| kidding. It's incredible as long as you use a proper analyze-
| plan-implement-test-document process.
| mergesort wrote:
| Heya, author here! Admittedly this was a quick blog post I
| fired off, much shorter than my usual writing.
|
| My goal wasn't to create a complete comparison of both tools --
| but to provide a little theory a behavior I'm seeing. You're
| (absolutely) right that it's a theory not a study, and I made
| sure to state that in the post. :)
|
| Mostly though the conclusion describes pretty succinctly why I
| wrote the post, as a way to get more people to try more of the
| tools so they can adequately form their own conclusions.
|
| > I think back to coworkers I've had over the years, and their
| varying preferences. Some people couldn't start coding until
| they had a checklist of everything they needed to do to solve a
| problem. Others would dive right in and prototype to learn
| about the space they would be operating in.
|
| > The tools we use to build are moving fast and hard to keep up
| with, but we've been blessed with a plethora of choices. The
| good news is that there is no wrong choice when it comes to AI.
| That's why I don't dismiss people who live in Claude Code, even
| though I personally prefer Codex.
|
| > The tool you choose should match how you work, not the other
| way around. If you use Claude, I'd suggest trying Codex for a
| week to see if maybe you're a Codex person and didn't know it.
| And if you use Codex, I'd recommend trying Claude Code for a
| week to see if maybe you're more of a Claude person than you
| thought.
|
| > Maybe you'll discover your current approach isn't the best
| fit for you. Maybe you won't. But I'm confident you'll find
| that every AI tool has its strengths and weaknesses, and the
| only way to discover what they are is by using them.
| willaaam wrote:
| Hey! Didn't mean my comment negatively towards you in any
| way, though I now realize it might've come across as such.
| Blogs with opinions based on experiences alone are absolutely
| fine, thanks for sharing.
|
| What I did mean is to indicate that your blog felt like a HN
| comment to me, where I generally expect a HN link to be news
| or facts that subsequently spark a discussion.
|
| At the end of your post I guess I was hoping or expecting
| facts or examples, indicating it was engaging enough to read
| to the end.
|
| Happy holidays!
| mergesort wrote:
| No problem at all! I read it as a bit pithy, but I didn't
| think it was particularly mean spirited.
|
| If you check out my writing on build.ms and fabisevi.ch
| you'll see that the majority of it is meant to be evergreen
| observations of a concept or a moment in time. My goal is
| to make people think and to think about thinking, more than
| it is to tell people what exactly to think.
|
| If I had to summarize my style in one sentence, it would
| walking people to and around an idea, and leaving the rest
| as an exercise to the reader. Naturally, this means I have
| less control over how people interpret my writing so I do
| try and cover my bases with fact and experience, but that
| still means sometimes I won't deliver a complete picture to
| everyone.
|
| In that case, sometimes I come to a place like HN or
| Bluesky or Mastodon where my post is being discussed and
| try add some perspective and clarity through constructive
| conversation. :)
|
| If I'm being honest, I think we're too early in the state
| of generative AI as a coding tool to draw very strong
| factual conclusions for many of our experiences using AI to
| code that will hold up well. I'm not implying it's all
| vibes, but I think it would be pretty hard to wrap up my
| post in a bow the way you're suggesting. On the other hand
| I'm always open to well-considered feedback -- and would
| love to know more about your experience if you're
| interested in sharing!
|
| That's a long way of saying happy holidays to you as well!
| adastra22 wrote:
| It's funny because my use of Claude Code is the opposite. I use
| slash commands with instructions to find context, and basically
| never interact with it while it is doing its thing.
| kukkeliskuu wrote:
| How do you get it to stop to ask you something sometimes when
| it is doing its thing?
| bdangubic wrote:
| instruct it to stop and ask something sometimes when it is
| doing its thing. it is one of my core instructions at every
| level of its memory. if instructed, it will stop when it
| feels like should stop and in my personal experience it is
| suprisingly good at stopping. I've read here a lot of
| people having a different experience and opting for smaller
| tasks instead though...
| CjHuber wrote:
| I do feel like the Codex CLI is quite a bit behind CC. If I
| recall correctly it took months for Codex to get the nice ToDo
| Tool Claude Code uses in memory to structure a task into
| substeps. Also I'm missing the ability to have the main agent
| invoke subagents a lot.
|
| All this of course can be added using MCPs, but it's still
| friction. The Claude Code SDK is also way better than OpenAI
| Agents, it's almost no comparison.
|
| Also in general when I experienced bugs with Codex I was always
| almost sure to find an open GitHub issue with people already
| asking about a fix for months.
|
| Still I like GPT-5.2 very much for coding and general agent
| tasks, and there is EveryCode which is a nice fork of Codex that
| mitigates a lot of shortcomings
| frwickst wrote:
| You can use Every Code [1] (a Codex fork) for this, it can
| invoke agents, but not just codex ones, but claude and gemini
| as well.
|
| [1] https://github.com/just-every/code
| CjHuber wrote:
| Seems like you wrote at the same time I did my edit, yes
| Every Code is great however Ctlr+T is important to get
| terminal rendering otherwise is has performance problems for
| me
| sumedh wrote:
| > with people already asking about a fix for months.
|
| OpenAI needs to get access to Claude Code to fix them :)
| dist-epoch wrote:
| The general consensus today is that ToDo tool is obsolete and
| lowers performance for frontier models (Opus 4.5, GPT-5.2)
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| Respectfully I don't think the author appreciates that the
| configurability of Claude Code _is_ its performance advantage. I
| would much rather just tell it what to do and have it go do it,
| but I am much more able to do that with a highly configured
| Claude Code than with Codex which is pretty much just set at the
| out of the box quality level.
|
| I spend most of my engineering time these days not on writing
| code or even thinking about my product, but on Claude Code
| configuration (which is portable so should another solution arise
| I can move it). Whenever Claude Code _doesn't_ oneshot something,
| that is an opportunity for improvement.
| monerozcash wrote:
| Hey, I'm not very familiar with Claude Code. Can you explain
| what configuration you're referring to?
|
| Is this just things like skills and MCPs, or something else?
| CharlesW wrote:
| Skills, MCPs, /commands, agents, hooks, plugins, etc. I
| package https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ as an easily-
| installable Claude Code plugin, and AFAICT I'm not able to do
| that for any other AI coding environment.
| monerozcash wrote:
| You can do basically all that with codex, although claude
| might have slightly more convenient tooling. The end result
| will be the same anyway.
| CharlesW wrote:
| That hasn't been my experience, although I'm happy to
| accept that I'm the problem. Apparently they've released
| their skills support (?), so I should try again.
| https://developers.openai.com/codex/skills
| dist-epoch wrote:
| OpenCode, Pi are even more configurable.
| mergesort wrote:
| Heya, I'm the author of the post and I just wanted to say I do
| appreciate the configurability! As I mentioned in the post, I
| have been that kind of developer in the past.
|
| > This is a perfect match for engineers who love configuring
| their environments. I can't tell you how many full days of my
| life I've lost trying out new Xcode features or researching VS
| Code extensions that in practice make me 0.05% more productive.
|
| And I tried to be pretty explicit about the idea that this is a
| very personal choice.
|
| > Personally -- and I do emphasize this is a personal decision
| -- I'd rather write a well-spec'd plan and go do something else
| for 15 minutes. Claude's Plan Mode is exceptional, and that's
| why so many people fall in love with Claude once they try it.2
|
| For every person who feels like me today, there's someone who
| feels like you out there. And for every person who feels like
| you, there's someone like me (today) who finds it not as
| valuable to their workflow. That's the reason my conclusion was
| all about getting folks to try out both to see what works for
| them -- because people change and it's worth finding out who
| you really at this moment in time.
|
| Anyhow, I do think that Codex is also very configurable -- I
| was just trying to emphasize that it's really great out the box
| while Claude Code requires more tuning. But that tuning makes
| it more personal, which as you mention is a huge plus! As I've
| touched on in a few posts [^1] [^2] Skills are to me a big
| deal, because they allow people to achieve high levels of
| customization without having to be the kind of developer that
| devotes a lot of time to creating their perfect set up. (Now
| supported in both Claude Code and Codex.)
|
| I don't want this to turn into a bit of a ramble so I'll just
| say that I agree with you -- but also there's a lot of nuance
| here because we're all having very personal coding experiences
| with AI -- so it may not entirely sound like I agree with you.
| :)
|
| Would love to hear more about your specific customizations, to
| make sure that I'm not missing out on anything valuable. :D
|
| [1]: https://build.ms/2025/10/17/your-first-claude-skill/ [2]:
| https://build.ms/2025/12/1/scribblenauts-for-software/
| motoboi wrote:
| It's hard to compare the two tools because they change so much
| and so fast.
|
| Right now, as an example, claude code with opus 4.5 is a beast,
| but before that, with sonnet 4.0, codex was much better.
|
| Gemini-cli, on the other hand, with gemini-flash-3.0 (which is
| strangely good for the "small and fast" model), it's very good
| (but the cli and the user experience are not on par with codex or
| claude yet).
|
| So we need to be in constant observations of those tools.
| Currently (after gemini-flash-3.0 came out), I tend to submit the
| same task to claude (with opus) and gemini to understand the
| behaviour. gemini is surprising me.
| mergesort wrote:
| Heya, author here! I completely agree with you -- and why the
| post is titled Codex vs. Claude Code (Today). I also have this
| very specific disclaimer in the second paragraph to note that
| this post is a reflection of a moment in time. :D
|
| > Before we continue, I need to make a disclaimer: This post is
| about the Claude Code and Codex, on December 22, 2025.
| Everything in AI changes so fast that I have almost no
| expectations about the validity of these statements in a year,
| or probably even 3-6 months from now.
|
| That said I do what you do and try different models when I want
| to see if things have changed. I run my own private little
| benchmarks with a few complex real world tasks, and I really
| love seeing how things are progressing -- both in terms of
| quality but also the novel quirks that are introduced, changed,
| or removed. :)
| sixhobbits wrote:
| This is an interesting opinion but I would like to see some proof
| or at least more details.
|
| What plans are you using, what did you build, what was the output
| from both on similar inputs, what's an example of a prompt that
| took you two hours to write, what was the output, etc?
| mergesort wrote:
| Heya, author here!
|
| I'll try to answer these one by one, but I will just note that
| a lot of my prompts are domain specific so it's hard to share
| those.
|
| - I don't use any plans -- my writing is the plan. The Plan
| Mode in Claude Code is excellent, but as I've switched to Codex
| (which doesn't have one) I will simply write up a nice long
| prompt and then add "Please ask any clarifying questions you
| may have, or for any additional details that you need" -- and
| it works great! I may go back and forth for anywhere from 5-30
| minutes depending on what else is needed, but that's basically
| the experience of using Plan Mode in Claude Code too.
|
| - I've built quite a few recent features for my app Plinky
| [^1]. I've made a few meaningful contributions to my open
| source project Boutique [^2] (and have been having AI
| asynchronously sketch out a large new database relationships
| feature). I built my new blog and my workshops pages [^3] with
| Codex as well. Truth is I do practically everything in Codex
| and Claude Code these days, so I'd have more trouble listing
| what I haven't built lately.
|
| - Plinky's upcoming Reader Mode is a good example of a prompt
| that took me two hours, but the feature isn't yet in the app so
| I'd prefer not to share the prompt. But I can share the first
| draft of the prompt for Boutique's relationships feature sine
| that's open source. [^4] I've been experimenting with using
| ChatGPT Pulse to make progress on it every day (simply by
| asking it to!), and much to my surprise it's been designing a
| new API day by day in a way that's far from perfect but
| certaintly has been very interesting.
|
| The honest truth is that this one did not take two hours and I
| wrote it on the bus so it's probably not perfect, but the
| descriptive process is effectively the same. For a feature like
| Reader Mode you would have to capture more details to scale up
| to the additional complexity of a domain-specific feature with
| client and server components, a new download queueing pipeline,
| amongst other abstractions.
|
| Hope that answers your questions!
|
| [^1]: https://plinky.app [^2]:
| https://github.com/mergesort/Boutique [^3]: https://build.ms
| [^4]:
| https://gist.github.com/mergesort/04a77c47ea4cb6433aa9ade4e1...
| Rperry2174 wrote:
| I've noticed a lot of these posts tend to go codex vs claude, but
| as author is someone who does AI workshops curious why Cursor is
| left out of this post (and more generally posts like this).
|
| From my personal experience I find cursor to be much more robust
| because rather than "either / or" its both and can switch
| depending on the time or the task or whatever the newest model
| is.
|
| It feels like the same way people often try to avoid "vendor lock
| in" in software world that Cursor allows freedom for that, but
| maybe I'm on my own here as I don't see it naturally come up in
| posts like these as much.
| tin7in wrote:
| Speaking from personal experience and talking to other users -
| the agents/harnesses of the vendors are just better and they
| are customized for their own models.
| Rperry2174 wrote:
| what kinds of tasks do you find this to be true for? For a
| while I was using claude code inside of the cursor terminal,
| but I found it to be basically the same as just using the
| same claude model in there.
|
| Presumably the harness cant be doing THAT much differently
| right? Or rather what tasks are responsibilities of the
| harness could differentiate one harness from another harness
| tin7in wrote:
| This becomes clearer for me with harder problems or long
| running tasks and sessions. Especially with larger context.
|
| Examples that come to mind are how the context is filled up
| and how compaction works. Both Codex and Claude Code ship
| improvements regarding this specific to their own models
| and I'm not sure how this is reflected in tools like
| Cursor.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Github Copilot also allows you to use both models, codex,
| claude, and gemini on top.
|
| Cursor has this "tool for kids" vibe, it's also more about the
| past - "tab, tab, enter" low-level coding versus the future -
| "implement task 21" high level delegating.
| oldandboring wrote:
| I feel you brother/sister. I actually pay for Claude Code Max
| and _also_ for the $20 /mo Cursor plan. I use Claude Code via
| the VSCode extension running within the Cursor IDE. 95% of my
| usage is Claude Code via that extension (or through the CLI in
| certain situations) but it's great having Cursor as a backup.
| Sometimes I want to have another model check Claude's work, for
| example.
| mergesort wrote:
| Heya, author here! That's a great question! I fully understand
| the vendor lock-in concern, but I'll just quickly note that
| when it comes to a first workshop I do whatever makes the
| person most comfortable. I let the attendee choose the tool
| they want -- with a slight nudge towards Codex or Claude Code
| for reasons I'll mention below. But if they want to do the
| workshop in Cursor, VS Code, or heck MS Paint -- I'll try to
| find a way to make it work as long as it means they're
| learning.
|
| I actually started teaching these workshops by using Cursor,
| but found that it fell short for a few reasons.
|
| Note: The way that my workshops work is that you have three
| hours to build something real. It may be scoped down like a
| single feature or a small app or a high quality prototype, but
| you'll walk away with what you wanted to build. More
| importantly you'll have learned the fundamentals of working
| with AI in the process, so you can continue this on your own
| and see meaningful results. We go through various exercises to
| really understand good prompting (since everyone thinks they're
| good but they rarely are), how to build context for models, and
| explore the landscape of tools that you can use to get better
| results. A lot of that time is actually spent in a Google Doc
| that I've prepped with resources -- and the work we do there
| makes the code practically write itself by the time we're done.
|
| Here's a short list of why I don't default to Cursor:
|
| 1. As I noted in another comment, the model performance is just
| so much better [^1] when accessed directly through Codex and
| Claude Code, which means more promising results more quickly.
| Previously the workshops were 3-4 hours just to finish, now
| it's a solid 3 with time to ask questions afterwards. You can't
| beat this experience, because it gives the student more time to
| pause and ask questions, seep in what they've done, and not
| spend time trying to understand the tools just to see results.
| 1a. The amount of time it took someone to set up Cursor was
| pretty long. The process for getting a good set up is pretty
| long -- especially for someone non-technical. This may not be
| as big of a deal for developers using Cursor -- but even they
| don't know a lot of the settings and tweaks to make to get
| Cursor to be great out the box.
|
| 2. The user experience of dropping a prompt into Codex/Claude
| Code and watch it start solving a problem is pretty amazing. I
| love GUIs -- I spend my days building one [^3], but the TUI
| melting away everything to just being chat is an advantage when
| you have no mental model for how this stuff works.
|
| 3. As I said in #1, the results are just better. That's really
| the main reason! I
|
| Not to toot my own horn, but the process works. These are all
| testimonials in the words of people who have attended a
| workshop, and I'm very proud of how people not only learn
| during the workshop but how it sets them off on a good path
| afterwards. [^2]. I have people messaging me 24 hours later
| telling me that they built an app their partner has wanted for
| years, to tell me that they've completed the app we started and
| it does everything they dreamed of, and hear more process over
| the weeks and months after because I urge them to keep sending
| me their AI wins. (It's truly amazing how much they grow, and I
| now have attendees teaching ME things -- the ultimate dream of
| being a teacher knowing you gave them the nudge they needed.)
|
| Hope that helps and isn't too much of an ad -- I really just
| want to make it clear that I try to do what works best and if
| the best way to help people learn changes I will gladly change
| how I work. :)
|
| [^1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46393001 [^2]:
| https://build.ms/ai#testimonials [^3]: https://plinky.app
| robbiep wrote:
| I got a student subscription to cursor and after giving it a
| good 6 hours I've abandoned it.
|
| I extremely dislike the way it goes forth and bolts. I don't
| trust these tools enough to just point it in the direction and
| say go, I like to be a human in the loop. Perhaps the use case
| I was working on then was difficult (quite old react native
| library upgrade across a medium sized codebase) but I
| eventually cracked this on Claude; cursor in both entropic and
| Gemini left me with an absolute mess.
|
| Even repeatedly asking the prompt to keep me in the loop it
| kept on just running haywire.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| I've been using Claude code most of the year, and codex since
| soon after it released:
|
| It's important to separate vibes coding from vibes engineering
| here. For production coding, I create fairly strict plans -- not
| details, but sequences, step requirements, and documented
| updating of the plan as it goes. I can run the same plan in both,
| and it's clear that codex is poor at instruction following
| because I see it go off plan most of the time. At the same time
| it can go on its own pretty far in an undirected way.
|
| The result is when I'm doing serious planned work aimed for
| production PRs, I have to use Claude. When it's experimental and
| I don't care about quality but speed and distance, such as for
| prototyping or debugging, codex is great.
|
| Edit: I don't think codex being poor at instruction following is
| inherent, just where they are today
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Spec dev can certainly be effective, but having used Claude Code
| since its release, I've found the pattern of continuous
| refactoring of design and code produces amazing results.
|
| And I'll never use OpenAI dev tools because the company insists
| on a complete absence of ethical standards.
| songodongo wrote:
| Anthropic is partnered with Palantir though...
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Yeah. It's a thin line, but I still think Anthropic is
| _trying_ to thread the needle while Altman is trying to get
| the government to give content theft cover.
| cube2222 wrote:
| I've checked out codex after the glowing reviews here around
| September / October and it was, all in all, a letdown (this was
| writing greenfield modules in a larger existing codebase).
|
| Codex was very context efficient, but also slow (though I used
| the highest thinking effort), and didn't adapt do the wider
| codebase almost at all (even if I pointed it at the files to
| reference / get inspired by). Lots of defensive programming,
| hacky implementations, not adapting to the codebase style and
| patterns.
|
| With Claude Code and starting each conversation by referencing a
| couple existing files, I am able to get it to write code mostly
| like I would've written it. It adapts to existing patterns,
| adjusts to the code style, etc. I can steer it very well.
|
| And now with the new cheaper faster Opus it's also quite an
| improvement. If you kick off sonnet with a long list of
| constraints (e.g. 20) it would often ignore many. Opus is much
| better at "keeping more in mind" while writing the code.
|
| Note: yes, I do also have an agent.md / claude.md. But I also
| heavily rely on warming the context up with some context dumping
| at conversation starts.
| throwaway12345t wrote:
| All codex conversations need to be caveat with the model
| because it varies significantly. Codex requires very little
| tweaking but you do need to select the highest thinking model
| if you're writing code and recommend the highest thinking NON-
| code model for planning. That's really it, it takes task time
| up to 5-20m but it's usually great.
|
| Then I ask Opus to take a pass and clean up to match codebase
| specs and it's usually sufficient. Most of what I do now is
| detailed briefs for Codex, which is...fine.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Why non-thinking model? Also 5-20 minutes?! I guess I don't
| know what kind of code you are writing but for my web app
| backends/frontends planning takes like 2-5 minutes tops with
| Sonnet and I have yet to feel the need to even try Opus.
| thejazzman wrote:
| In my experience sonnet > opus, so it's not surprise you
| don't "need" opus. They charge a premium on sonnet now
| instead
| throwaway12345t wrote:
| I probably write overly detailed starting prompts but it
| means I get pretty aligned results. It does take longer but
| I try to think through the implementation first before the
| planning starts.
| dworks wrote:
| I will jump between a ChatGPT window and a VSCode window with
| the Codex plugin. I'll create an initial prompt in ChatGPT,
| which will ask the coding agent to audit the current
| implementation, then draft an implementation plan. The plan
| bounces between Chat and Codex about 5 times, with Chat
| telling Codex how to improve. Then Codex implements, creates
| an implementation summary, which I give to Chat. Chat then
| asks to add a couple of things fixes, then it's done.
| pshirshov wrote:
| On hard projects (really hard, like
| https://github.com/7mind/jopa), Codex fails spectacularly. The
| only competition is Claude vs Gemini 3 Pro.
| funnyfoobar wrote:
| The process you have described for Codex is scary to me
| personally.
|
| it takes only one extra line of code in my world(finance) to have
| catastrophic consequences.
|
| even though i am using these tools like claude/cursor, i make
| sure to review every small bit it generated to a level, where i
| ask it create a plan with steps, and then perform each step, ask
| me for feedback, only when i give approval/feedback, it either
| proceeds for the next step or iterate on previous step, and on
| top of that i manually test everything I send for PR.
|
| because there is no value in just sending a PR vs sending a
| verified/tested PR
|
| with that said, I am not sure how much of your code is getting
| checked in without supervision, as it's very difficult for people
| to review weeks worth of work at a time.
|
| just my 2 cents
| mergesort wrote:
| Heya, I'm the author of the post! To be clear I have AI write
| probably 95% of my code these days, but I review every line of
| code that AI writes to make sure it meets my high standards.
| The same rules I've always had still apply -- to quote @simonw
| "your job is to deliver code you have proven to work".
|
| So while I'm enthusiastic about AI writing my code in the
| literal sense, it's still my code to understand and maintain.
| If I can't do that then I work with AI to understand what was
| written -- and if I can't then I'll often give it another go
| with another approach altogether so I can generate something I
| can understand. (Most of the time working together to
| understand the code works better, because I love to learn and
| am always open to pushing my boundaries to grow -- and this
| process can tuned well to self-directed learning.)
|
| And to quote a recent audit: "this is probably one of the
| cleanest codebases I've ever audited." I say that emphasize the
| fact that I care a lot about the code that goes into my
| codebase, and I'm not interested in building layers of
| unchecked AI slop for code that goes into my apps.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| I think the author glosses over the real reason why tons of
| people use Codex over CC: limits. If you want to use CC properly
| you must use Opus 4.5 which is not even included in the Claude
| Pro plan. Meanwhile you can use Codex with gpt-5.2-codex on the
| ChatGPT Plus plan for some seriously long sessions.
|
| Looks like Gemini plans have even more generous limits on the
| equivalently priced plans (Google AI Pro). I'd be interested in
| the experiences of people who used Google Antigravity/Gemini
| CLI/Gemini Code Assist for nontrivial tasks.
| Tiberium wrote:
| A small correction: Opus 4.5 _is_ included in the Pro plan
| nowadays, but yeah, the usage limits for it on the $20 sub are
| really, really low.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| Opus IS included in Pro plan.
| throwawaybla73 wrote:
| Opus 4.5 is included in the Pro plan.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| Thanks for the correction, looks like I misremembered. But
| limits are low enough with Sonnet that, I imagine you can
| barely do anything serious with Opus on the Pro plan.
| Maxious wrote:
| Both Claude Pro and Google Antigravity free tier have Opus 4.5
| oldandboring wrote:
| Personally I bit the bullet and went with the Max plan for
| Claude Code. After tax it costs me ($108) less than I earn from
| one billable hour. I have been punishing it for the last two
| months, it defaults to Opus 4.5 and while I occasionally hit my
| session limit (it resets after an hour or so), I can't even
| scratch the surface of my monthly usage limit.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| And it has gotten very bad. I almost never hit the limit on the
| pro plan before with CC but now it happens very fast.
| mergesort wrote:
| Heya, author here! I do agree with you that this is a big
| downside, but I don't know if this is the primary reason.
|
| In my experience teaching people, most people don't actually
| know much at the time they make this decision. They've heard
| about Cursor, they've heard of Claude Code, and they may have
| heard about Codex. But what they've heard is anecdotes and
| marketing -- they don't yet have hands-on experience.
|
| They make a big choice and then assume that this is how all AI
| works, because they don't have a full breadth of context yet.
| And that's to be expected! That's how most things work.
|
| That is why I teach the workshops I do to make AI accessible,
| so people can walk through the tradeoffs and make the best
| educated choices for them.
|
| A couple of comments here have said that the post is subtly
| pro-Codex, but I tried to make my point very explicit: people
| should try a lot of things and see what works best for them.
| But it's very hard to do that without investing a lot of time
| because the market is so nascent and moving so fast. This post
| exists to try and nudge people into exploring more of the tools
| they haven't tried yet, so they can make their own informed
| decisions like you have. :)
|
| All that's to say, people definitely hit limits with Claude
| Code (as I have done myself) -- especially if they're hesitant
| to upgrade to Claude Max because they haven't gotten enough out
| of Claude Pro. But I think the real reason people make the
| choices they do starts earlier in the process, even before they
| get a lot of hands on experience with Claude Code or Codex.
| btbuildem wrote:
| I don't think the comparison to programming languages holds,
| maybe very tenuously at best. Coding assistants evolve
| constantly, you can't even be talking about "Codex" without
| specifying the time range (ie, Codex 2025-10) because it's
| different from quarter to quarter. Same with CC.
|
| I believe this is the main source of disagreement /
| disappointment when people read opinions / reviews, then proceed
| to have an experience very different from expected.
|
| Ironically, this constant improvement/evolution erodes product
| loyalty -- personally, I'm a creature of habit and will stay with
| a tool past its expiry date; with coding assistants / sota llms,
| I cancel and switch subscriptions all the time.
| mergesort wrote:
| Heya, author of the post here! I think you're right in
| everything you've said, but I want to note that the programming
| language comparison was meant to be metaphorical more than
| literal. Everything is changing so fast (as I mention in the
| post a few times), but I have seen some (far from all) people
| get locked into Claude Code or Codex in a way where they won't
| even consider alternatives the same way people they chose Ruby
| to start their career and now identify as Ruby developers.
|
| My goal was to open people's minds just a little bit by saying
| exactly what you're getting at -- everything is moving fast and
| we should be reassessing often. A meaningful difference is that
| you can start a codebase with Claude Code and then switch to
| Codex with almost no friction, while you can't just migrate a
| TypeScript app to Python in 15 minutes.
|
| All that's to say, we agree!
| veidr wrote:
| I tried so hard to make Codex work, after the glowing reviews
| (not just from Internet randos/potential-shills, though; people I
| know well, also).
|
| It's objectively worse for me on every possible axis than Claude
| Code. I even wondered if maybe I was on some kind of shadow-ban
| nerf-list for making fun of Sam Altman's WWDC outfit in a tweet
| 20 years ago. (^_^)
|
| I don't love Claude's over-exuberant personality, and prefer
| Codex's terse (arguably sullen) responses.
|
| But they both fuck up often (as they all do), and unlike Claude
| Code (Opus, always), Codex has been net-negative for me. I'm not
| speed-sensitive, I round-robin among a bunch of sessions, so I
| use the max thinking option at all times, but Codex 5.1 and 5.2
| for me are just _worse_ code, and worse than that, _worse at code
| review_ to the point that it negated whatever gains I had gotten
| from it.
|
| While all of them miss a ton of stuff (of course), and LLM code
| review just really isn't good unless the PR is tiny -- Claude
| just misses stuff (fine; expected), while Codex comes up with
| plausible edge-case database query concurrency bugs that I have
| to look at, and squint at, and then think _hmm fuck_ and manually
| google with kagi.com for 30 minutes ( _LIKE AN ANIMAL_ ) only to
| conclude _yeah, not true, you 're hallucinating bud_, to which
| Codex is just like. "Noted; you are correct. If you want, I can
| add a comment to that effect, to avoid confusion in future."
|
| So for me, head-to-head, Claude murders Codex -- and yet I know
| that isn't true for everybody, so it's weird.
|
| What I do like Codex for is reviewing Claude's work (and of
| course I have all of them review my own work, why not?). Even
| there, though, Codex sometimes flags nonexistent bugs in Claude's
| code -- less annoying, though, since I just let them duke it out,
| writing tests that prove it one way or the other, and don't have
| to manually get involved.
| oldandboring wrote:
| I must be doing something wrong. When I last tried to use Codex
| 5.2 (via Cursor), no amount of prompting could get it to stop
| aggressively asking me for permission to do things. This seems to
| be the opposite of the article's claim, which is that Codex is
| better for long-running, hands off tasks.
| mergesort wrote:
| Heya, I'm the author of the post! This was probably
| unintentional but I think you're making a really valuable
| observation that will be helpful to others.
|
| The models Cursor provides to use in their product are
| intermediated versions of models that companies like OpenAI and
| Anthropic offer. They are technically using Codex, but not in
| the way that they would be if you were in a tool like Codex
| (CLI) or Claude Code.
|
| If you ask Cursor to solve a tough problem, Cursor will break
| down the problem into a different problem before sending that
| request to OpenAI so they can use Codex. They do this because:
| 1. To save money. By restructuring the prompt they can use less
| tokens, saving them money for running Cursor since they are the
| ones paying for the tokens with your subscription cost. 2.
| [Based on things the Cursor team has said] They believe they
| can construct a better intermediate prompt that is more
| representative of the problem you want to solve.
|
| This extra level of abstraction means that you are not getting
| the best results when you use a tool like Cursor. OpenAI and
| Anthropic are running their harnesses Codex CLI and Claude Code
| at a loss (because VC), but providing better results. This is
| not the best way to make money, but it's a great way to build
| mindshare and hopefully get customers for life. (People are
| fickle and cheap though so I doubt this is a customers for life
| strategy the way people buy the same brand of deodorant once
| they start buying Dove.)
|
| Happy to answer any questions you may have, but mostly I would
| highly suggest trying out Codex CLI and Claude Code to get a
| better feel for what I'm saying -- and to also to get more out
| of your AI tools. :)
| mulmboy wrote:
| Is it just me or is codex _slow_?
|
| With claude code I'll ask it to read a couple of files and do x
| similar to existing thing y. It takes a few moments to read files
| and then just does it. All done in a minute or so.
|
| I tried something similar with codex and it took 20 minutes
| reading around bits of file and this and that. I didn't bother
| letting it finish. Is this normal? Do I have something
| misconfigured? This was a couple of months ago.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > You've got your CLAUDE.md, Skills, Agents, MCP, slash commands,
| and so much more.
|
| How many people use none of this?
| mergesort wrote:
| Heya, author of the post here. That's a good call out because
| it's probably a lot!
|
| And now that you mention it, that's also one failure case for
| why some people look at AI and go "this just isn't very good at
| coding". I'm not saying it has to be that way nor will it be
| that way forever, but there are absolutely a lot of people who
| just download Claude Code or Cursor or Codex and dive right in
| without any additional set up.
|
| That's partially why I suggest people use Codex for the
| workshops I offer, because it provides the best results with no
| set up. All of these tools have a nearly unending amount of
| progressive disclosure because there's so much invisible
| configuration and best practices are changing so fast. I'm
| still trying not to imply that one tool is "better" than
| another (even if I have my preference), but more so hit on the
| fact that which AI tools people like is mostly about your
| preferred set of tradeoffs.
| bdangubic wrote:
| > That's partially why I suggest people use Codex for the
| workshops I offer, because it provides the best results with
| no set up.
|
| I would do the exact opposite... If we are pitching "this
| shit works magically without any setup" people will expect
| magic and they absolutely will not get magic as there is no
| magic. I believe, especially if we are educators (you
| obviously are!!) that it is our responsibility to teach it
| "right" - my workshop would probably spend at least 75% of
| the time on the setup
| josefrichter wrote:
| I think a big part is which model seems to work better with your
| language/stack. My language is Elixir, which is somewhat niche,
| and only Claude has been able to produce usable Elixir code so
| far. None of the other things mentioned in the article mattered,
| because of this. I wonder if others have this experience that
| some models just struggle with some languages/stacks?
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| I switched from OpenAI models to using Anthropic ones some time
| ago, and every once in a while I briefly check in again just in
| case. I continue to be amazed at how infuriating OpenAI's agents
| are. They do things I never asked for, make decisions I didn't
| ask them to make, impute assumptions I never suggested, and just
| generally rapidly piss me off. I find it maddening, and then I
| immediately switch back to using Claude and it's like an
| immediate wave of relief washes over me because Claude just
| always seems to follow along with me and do what I actually want.
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