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I've been extremely impressed (and actually had quite a good time) with GPT-5 and Codex so far. It seems to handle long context well, does a great job researchi

I've been extremely impressed (and actually had quite a good time) with GPT-5 and Codex so far. It seems to handle long context well, does a great job researching the code, never leaves things half-done (with long tasks it may leave some steps for later, but it never does 50% of a step and then just randomly mock a function like Gemini used to), and gives me good suggestions if I'm trying to do something I shouldn't. And the Codex CLI also seems to be getting constant, meaningful updates.

EnPissant 1y ago
My experience with Codex / Gpt-5: - The smartest model I have used. Solves problems better than Opus-4.1. - It can be lazy. With Claude Code / Opus, once given a problem, it will generally work until completion. Codex will often perform only the first few steps and then ask if I want to continue to do the rest. It does this even if I tell it to not stop until completion. - I have seen severe degradation near max context. For example, I have seen it just repeat the next steps every time I tell it to continue and I have to manually compact. I'm not sure if the problems are Gpt-5 or Codex. I suspect a better Codex could resolve them.
- brookst 1y ago
  Claude seems to have gotten worse for me, with both that kind of laziness and a new pattern where it will write the test, write the code, run the test, and then declare that the test is working perfectly but there are problems in the (new) code that need to be fixed. Very frustrating, and happening more often.
  - elliot07 1y ago
    They for sure nerfed it within the last ~3 weeks. There's a measurable difference in quality.
    - conception 1y ago
      They actually just had a bug fix and it seems like it recently got a lot better in the last week or so
- M4v3R 1y ago
  Context degradation is a real problem with all frontier LLMs. As a rule of thumb I try to never exceed 50% of available context window when working with either Claude Sonnet 4 or GPT-5 since the quality drops really fast from there.
  - EnPissant 1y ago
    I've never seen that level of extreme degradation (just making a small random change and repeating the same next steps infinitely) on Claude Code. Maybe Claude Code is more aggressive about auto compaction. I don't think Codex even compacts without /compact.
    - Jcampuzano2 1y ago
      I think some of it is not necessarily auto compaction but the tooling built in. For example claude code itself very frequently builds in to remind the model what its working on and should be doing which helps always keeps its tasks in the most recent context, and overall has some pretty serious thought put into its system prompt and tooling. But they have suffered quite a lot of degradation and quality issues recently. To be honest unless Anthropic does something very impactful sometime soon I think they're losing their moat they had with developers as more and more jump to codex and other tools. They kind of massively threw their lead imo.
      - EnPissant 1y ago
        Yeah, I think you are right.
  - darkteflon 1y ago
    Agreed, and judicious use of subagents to prevent pollution of the main thread is another good mitigant.
  - faangguyindia 1y ago
    I cap my context at 50k tokens.
- tanvach 1y ago
  I also noticed the laziness compared to Sonnet models but now I feel it’s a good feature. Sonnet models, now I realize, are way too eager to hammer out code with way more likelihood of bugs.
- bayesianbot 1y ago
  I definitely agree with all of those points. I just really prefer it completing steps and asking me if we should continue to next step rather than doing half of the step and telling me it's done. And the context degradation seems quite random - sometimes it hits way earlier, sometimes we go through crazy amount of tokens and it all works out.
- apigalore 1y ago
  Yes, this is the one thing stopping me from going to Codex completely. Currently, it's kind of annoying that Codex stops often and asks me what to do, and I just reply "continue". Even though I already gave it a checklist. With GPT‑5-Codex they do write: "During testing, we've seen GPT‑5-Codex work independently for more than 7 hours at a time on large, complex tasks, iterating on its implementation, fixing test failures, and ultimately delivering a successful implementation." https://openai.com/index/introducing-upgrades-to-codex/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-upgrades-to-codex/
mritchie712 1y ago
Have you used Claude Code? How does it compare?
- mmaunder 1y ago
  It's objectively a big improvement over Claude Code. I'm rooting for anthropic, but they better make a big move or this will kill CC.
  - nightshift1 1y ago
    What are the usage limits like compared to Claude Code? Is it more like 5× or 20×? For twice the price, it would have to be very good.
    - naiv 1y ago
      https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11369540-using-codex-with-your-chatgpt-plan https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11369540-using-codex-wit... have to say not sure what this even means and what the exact definition of a message is in this context. with claude code max20 I was constantly hitting limits, with codex not once yet
      - mmaunder 1y ago
        Same. We're not hitting limits at all with Codex and it's ridiculously good at managing and preserving its context window while getting a metric fuckton of work done. It's kind of unbelievable actually. I don't know re billing. Not my dept.
  - mike_hearn 1y ago
    Are you talking about Codex CLI or their GitHub integration? GPT-5 is a great model. I tried Codex CLI Rust, as they seem to be deprecating the JS version, and it is awful. I don't know what possessed them to try and write a TUI in Rust but it isn't working. The Claude Code UI is hugely superior.
mmaunder 1y ago
Agreed. We're hardcore Claude Code users and my CC usage trended down to zero pretty quickly after I started using Codex. The new model updates today are great. Very well done OpenAI team!! CC was an existential threat. You responded and absolutely killed it. Your move Anthropic.
- Jcampuzano2 1y ago
  To be fair, Anthropic kinda did this to themselves. I consider it as a pretty massive throw on their end in terms of the fairly tight grasp they had on developer sentiment. Everyone else slowly caught up and/or surpassed them while they simultaneously had quality control issues and service degradation plaguing their system - ALL while having the most expensive models comparatively in terms of intelligence.
  - mmaunder 1y ago
    Agreed. I really wish Google would get their act together because I think they have the potential of being faster, cheaper with bigger context windows. They're so great at hardcore science and engineering, but they absolutely suck at products.
    - bjackman 1y ago
      I think this is being downvoted coz it doesn't seem to be really responding to the thread, and maybe it isn't, but for anyone who hasn't tried Gemini CLI: My experience after a month or so of heavy use is exactly this. The AI is rock solid. I'm pretty consistently impressed with its ability to derive insights from the code, when it works. But the client is flaky, the backend is flaky, and the overall experience for me is always "I wish I could just use Claude". Say 1 in 10 queries craps out (often the client OOMs even though I have 192Gb of RAM). Sounds like a 10% reliability issue but actually it just pushes me into "fuck this I'll just do it myself" so it knocks out like 50% of the value of the product. (Still, I wouldn't be surprised if this can be fixed over the next few months, it could easily be very competitive IMO).
FergusArgyll 1y ago
It doesn't seem to have any internal tools it can use. For example, web search; It just runs curl in the terminal. Compared to Gemini CLI that's rough but it does handle pasting much better... Maybe I'm just using both wrong...
- ollybee 1y ago
  web search too is off by default
- gizmodo59 1y ago
  Use --search option when you start codex
  - FergusArgyll 1y ago
    Thanks!
- Tiberium 1y ago
  It does have web search - it's just not enabled by default. You can enable it with --search or in the config, then it can absolutely search, for example finding manuals/algorithms.
  - FergusArgyll 1y ago
    Thanks!
catlover76 1y ago
[dead]
robotswantdata 1y ago
Agreed ditched my Claude code max for the $200 pro ChatGPT. Gemini cli is too inconsistent, good for documentation tasks. Don’t let it write code for you
- icelancer 1y ago
  Gemini's tool calling being so bad is pretty amazing. Hopefully in the next iteration they fix it, because the model itself is very good.
  - robbrulinski 1y ago
    That has been my experience as well with every Gemini model, ugh!
  - nowittyusername 1y ago
    This is a recurring theme with Google. Their models are phenomenal but the systems around them are so bad that it degrades the whole experience. Veo3 great model horrible website, and so on...
    - brianjking 1y ago
      Their massive increase in token processing since Veo3 and nano banana have been released would say otherwise... Or we're all just used to eating things we don't like and smiling.
DanielVZ 1y ago
Can someone compare it to cursor? So far i see people compare it with Claude code but I’ve had much more success and cost effectiveness with cursor than Claude code
- bionhoward 1y ago
  Doesn’t compare, because Cursor has a privacy mode. Why would anyone want to pay OpenAI or Anthropic to train their bots on your business codebase? You know where that leads? Unemployment!
vitorgrs 1y ago
Gemini seems to be pretty awful as agentic coding. It always finish the task, and when I see the result, it just breaks my code. Not sure the fault it's "doing bad code", I guess it's just not being good at being agentic. Saw this on Gemini CLI and other tools. GLM, Kimi, Qwen-Code all behaves better for me. Probably Gemini 3 will fix this, as Gemini 2.5 Pro it's "old" by now.
- faangguyindia 1y ago
  Gemini CLI is bad, model itself is really good.
troupo 1y ago
> then just randomly mock a function like Gemini used to Claude Code does that on longer tasks. Time to give Codex a try I guess.

EnPissant 1y ago

My experience with Codex / Gpt-5: - The smartest model I have used. Solves problems better than Opus-4.1. - It can be lazy. With Claude Code / Opus, once given a problem, it will generally work until completion. Codex will often perform only the first few steps and then ask if I want to continue to do the rest. It does this even if I tell it to not stop until completion. - I have seen severe degradation near max context. For example, I have seen it just repeat the next steps every time I tell it to continue and I have to manually compact. I'm not sure if the problems are Gpt-5 or Codex. I suspect a better Codex could resolve them.

brookst 1y ago
Claude seems to have gotten worse for me, with both that kind of laziness and a new pattern where it will write the test, write the code, run the test, and then declare that the test is working perfectly but there are problems in the (new) code that need to be fixed. Very frustrating, and happening more often.
- elliot07 1y ago
  They for sure nerfed it within the last ~3 weeks. There's a measurable difference in quality.
  - conception 1y ago
    They actually just had a bug fix and it seems like it recently got a lot better in the last week or so
M4v3R 1y ago
Context degradation is a real problem with all frontier LLMs. As a rule of thumb I try to never exceed 50% of available context window when working with either Claude Sonnet 4 or GPT-5 since the quality drops really fast from there.
- EnPissant 1y ago
  I've never seen that level of extreme degradation (just making a small random change and repeating the same next steps infinitely) on Claude Code. Maybe Claude Code is more aggressive about auto compaction. I don't think Codex even compacts without /compact.
  - Jcampuzano2 1y ago
    I think some of it is not necessarily auto compaction but the tooling built in. For example claude code itself very frequently builds in to remind the model what its working on and should be doing which helps always keeps its tasks in the most recent context, and overall has some pretty serious thought put into its system prompt and tooling. But they have suffered quite a lot of degradation and quality issues recently. To be honest unless Anthropic does something very impactful sometime soon I think they're losing their moat they had with developers as more and more jump to codex and other tools. They kind of massively threw their lead imo.
    - EnPissant 1y ago
      Yeah, I think you are right.
- darkteflon 1y ago
  Agreed, and judicious use of subagents to prevent pollution of the main thread is another good mitigant.
- faangguyindia 1y ago
  I cap my context at 50k tokens.
tanvach 1y ago
I also noticed the laziness compared to Sonnet models but now I feel it’s a good feature. Sonnet models, now I realize, are way too eager to hammer out code with way more likelihood of bugs.
bayesianbot 1y ago
I definitely agree with all of those points. I just really prefer it completing steps and asking me if we should continue to next step rather than doing half of the step and telling me it's done. And the context degradation seems quite random - sometimes it hits way earlier, sometimes we go through crazy amount of tokens and it all works out.
apigalore 1y ago
Yes, this is the one thing stopping me from going to Codex completely. Currently, it's kind of annoying that Codex stops often and asks me what to do, and I just reply "continue". Even though I already gave it a checklist. With GPT‑5-Codex they do write: "During testing, we've seen GPT‑5-Codex work independently for more than 7 hours at a time on large, complex tasks, iterating on its implementation, fixing test failures, and ultimately delivering a successful implementation." https://openai.com/index/introducing-upgrades-to-codex/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-upgrades-to-codex/

mritchie712 1y ago

Have you used Claude Code? How does it compare?

mmaunder 1y ago
It's objectively a big improvement over Claude Code. I'm rooting for anthropic, but they better make a big move or this will kill CC.
- nightshift1 1y ago
  What are the usage limits like compared to Claude Code? Is it more like 5× or 20×? For twice the price, it would have to be very good.
  - naiv 1y ago
    https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11369540-using-codex-with-your-chatgpt-plan https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11369540-using-codex-wit... have to say not sure what this even means and what the exact definition of a message is in this context. with claude code max20 I was constantly hitting limits, with codex not once yet
    - mmaunder 1y ago
      Same. We're not hitting limits at all with Codex and it's ridiculously good at managing and preserving its context window while getting a metric fuckton of work done. It's kind of unbelievable actually. I don't know re billing. Not my dept.
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  Are you talking about Codex CLI or their GitHub integration? GPT-5 is a great model. I tried Codex CLI Rust, as they seem to be deprecating the JS version, and it is awful. I don't know what possessed them to try and write a TUI in Rust but it isn't working. The Claude Code UI is hugely superior.

mmaunder 1y ago

Agreed. We're hardcore Claude Code users and my CC usage trended down to zero pretty quickly after I started using Codex. The new model updates today are great. Very well done OpenAI team!! CC was an existential threat. You responded and absolutely killed it. Your move Anthropic.

Jcampuzano2 1y ago
To be fair, Anthropic kinda did this to themselves. I consider it as a pretty massive throw on their end in terms of the fairly tight grasp they had on developer sentiment. Everyone else slowly caught up and/or surpassed them while they simultaneously had quality control issues and service degradation plaguing their system - ALL while having the most expensive models comparatively in terms of intelligence.
- mmaunder 1y ago
  Agreed. I really wish Google would get their act together because I think they have the potential of being faster, cheaper with bigger context windows. They're so great at hardcore science and engineering, but they absolutely suck at products.
  - bjackman 1y ago
    I think this is being downvoted coz it doesn't seem to be really responding to the thread, and maybe it isn't, but for anyone who hasn't tried Gemini CLI: My experience after a month or so of heavy use is exactly this. The AI is rock solid. I'm pretty consistently impressed with its ability to derive insights from the code, when it works. But the client is flaky, the backend is flaky, and the overall experience for me is always "I wish I could just use Claude". Say 1 in 10 queries craps out (often the client OOMs even though I have 192Gb of RAM). Sounds like a 10% reliability issue but actually it just pushes me into "fuck this I'll just do it myself" so it knocks out like 50% of the value of the product. (Still, I wouldn't be surprised if this can be fixed over the next few months, it could easily be very competitive IMO).

FergusArgyll 1y ago

It doesn't seem to have any internal tools it can use. For example, web search; It just runs curl in the terminal. Compared to Gemini CLI that's rough but it does handle pasting much better... Maybe I'm just using both wrong...

ollybee 1y ago
web search too is off by default
gizmodo59 1y ago
Use --search option when you start codex
- FergusArgyll 1y ago
  Thanks!
Tiberium 1y ago
It does have web search - it's just not enabled by default. You can enable it with --search or in the config, then it can absolutely search, for example finding manuals/algorithms.
- FergusArgyll 1y ago
  Thanks!

catlover76 1y ago

[dead]

robotswantdata 1y ago

Agreed ditched my Claude code max for the $200 pro ChatGPT. Gemini cli is too inconsistent, good for documentation tasks. Don’t let it write code for you

icelancer 1y ago
Gemini's tool calling being so bad is pretty amazing. Hopefully in the next iteration they fix it, because the model itself is very good.
- robbrulinski 1y ago
  That has been my experience as well with every Gemini model, ugh!
- nowittyusername 1y ago
  This is a recurring theme with Google. Their models are phenomenal but the systems around them are so bad that it degrades the whole experience. Veo3 great model horrible website, and so on...
  - brianjking 1y ago
    Their massive increase in token processing since Veo3 and nano banana have been released would say otherwise... Or we're all just used to eating things we don't like and smiling.

DanielVZ 1y ago

Can someone compare it to cursor? So far i see people compare it with Claude code but I’ve had much more success and cost effectiveness with cursor than Claude code

bionhoward 1y ago
Doesn’t compare, because Cursor has a privacy mode. Why would anyone want to pay OpenAI or Anthropic to train their bots on your business codebase? You know where that leads? Unemployment!

vitorgrs 1y ago

Gemini seems to be pretty awful as agentic coding. It always finish the task, and when I see the result, it just breaks my code. Not sure the fault it's "doing bad code", I guess it's just not being good at being agentic. Saw this on Gemini CLI and other tools. GLM, Kimi, Qwen-Code all behaves better for me. Probably Gemini 3 will fix this, as Gemini 2.5 Pro it's "old" by now.

faangguyindia 1y ago
Gemini CLI is bad, model itself is really good.

troupo 1y ago

> then just randomly mock a function like Gemini used to Claude Code does that on longer tasks. Time to give Codex a try I guess.