6 ms·

Claude Code vs. Codex: I built a sentiment dashboard from Reddit comments

141 points by waprin 1y ago

visiondude 1y ago
Ah bots analyzing bots. Seems openai has a larger bot army than Anthropic rn
- aaronSong 1y ago
  openai's crawling is the best. just following anthropic's way
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  Need to go to conferences and actually talk to people to understand what Real People (TM) think of GenAI.
  - TheRoque 1y ago
    And what would that be ? Please make me save a plane ticket
    - samhclark 1y ago
      I went to a b-sides yesterday (so: small, local, cybersecurity-focused) where someone described their feelings toward GenAI as "praying for Star Trek, but planning for Terminator." Someone else described AGI as a short term inevitability. Not many others addressed it directly. The vibe I got from offhand remarks was that people felt it was a thing being forced upon them that they are resistant to use.
the_duke 1y ago
In my experience gpt5-codex (medium) and codex-cli is notably better than Sonnet 4.5 and claude-code. (note: never tried Opus) It is slower, but the results are much more often correct and it doesn't rush into half-baked solutions/dumb approaches as eagerly. I'd much rather wait 5 minutes than have to clean up manually or try to coax a model into doing things differently. I also wouldn't be surprised if the slowness was partially due to OpenAI being quite resource constrained. They are repeatedly complaining about not having sufficient compute. Bigger picture: I think all the AI coding environments are incredibly immature. There are many improvements to be unlocked.
- ripped_britches 1y ago
  That’s falsifiable quite easily by measuring tokens per second. Rather, the real reason codex takes longer is that it does more work to read more context. IMO the results are much better with codex, not even close
- fragmede 1y ago
  Where codex falls short is in background processing, both running a daemon in the background and using its output as context while simultaneously being interactive for the user, and with subagents, ie, do multiple things in parallel. Presumably codex will catch up, but for now, that puts Claude Code ahead of things for me. As far as which one is better, it's highly dependent on what we're each doing, but I will say that I have this one project where bare "make" won't work, and I have a script that needs to be run instead. I have instructions to call that script in multiple .md files, and codex is able to call the script instead of make, but it keeps forgetting that and tries to run make which fails and it gets confused. (Claude code running on macOS host but build on Linux vm.) I could work around it, but that really takes the "shiny" factor off of codex+GPT-5 for me.
  - another_twist 1y ago
    Honestly I think the simplicity of codex to not do anything fancy pants like background coding is what gives it an edge. I am happy to wait for a while and even to repeat context to it (helps me remember stuff anyway) if it types out the right thing.
extr 1y ago
Notice how pricing is the top discussion theme. People love free shit and it's hard to deny codex usage limits are more generous. My 2c for someone who uses both tools pretty consistently in an enterprise context: - Codex-medium is better if you have a well articulated plan you "merely" need to execute on, need help finding a bug, have some specific complex piece of logic you need to tweak, truly need a ton of long range context to reason about an issue. It's great and usage limits are very generous! - Sonnet 4.5 is better for everything else. That means for me: non-coding CLI ops, git ops, writing code with it as a pair programmer, OOD tasks, big new chunks of functionality that are highly conceptual, architectural discussion, etc. I generally approve every edit and often interrupt it. The fast iteration and feedback is key. I probably use CC 80% of the time with Codex the other 20%. My company pays for CC and I don't even look at the cost. Most of my coworkers use CC over Codex. We do find the Codex PR reviewer to be the best of any tool out there. Codex gets a lot of play on twitter also because a lot of the most prolific voices there are solo devs who are "building in public". A greenfield, solo project is the ideal (only?) use case for running 5 agents in parallel or whatever. Codex is probably amazing at that. But it's not practical for building in enterprise contexts IMO.
- quintu5 1y ago
  For larger tasks that I know are parallelizable, I just tell Claude to figure out which steps can be parallelized and then have it go nuts with sub-agents. I’ve had pretty good success with that.
  - DanielAtDev 1y ago
    I need to try this because I've never deliberately told it to, but I've had it do it on it's own before. Now I'm wondering if that project had instructions somewhere about that, which could it explain why it happened.
    - quintu5 1y ago
      It sometimes does it on its own, but to get it to do so consistently, it needs to be told. Doubly so if you want it to split off more than one sub-agent. This works great for refactors that touch a large number of files. You can knock out a refactor that might take 30 minutes, a persistent checklist, and possibly multiple conversations, and one-shot it in two minutes and a single prompt.
kazinator 1y ago
Sucks-Rules-o-Meter, but 2025.
mikeocool 1y ago
Reading the comments and posts about both Claude Code and Codex on Reddit (and often hacker news), it’s hard to imagine they’re not extremely astroturfed. There seems to be constant stream of not terribly interesting or unique “my Claude code/codex success story” blog posts that mange to solicit so many upvotes.
- nickstinemates 1y ago
  Meanwhile I am talking about unique shit with Claude Code trying to draft on that sentiment for little to no traction with them. We've built the best way to automate and manage production infrastructure using these models and no one gives a shit. It's so weird.
  - typpilol 1y ago
    Best according to?
  - 100721 1y ago
    > Meanwhile I am talking about unique shit with Claude Code trying to draft on that sentiment for little to no traction with them. What does this mean? What do you mean unique shit? What do you mean when you say you’re trying to draft on the sentiment? What is “them” referring to? Genuinely. I’m not being (deliberately) obtuse, just trying to follow. Thanks
    - malshe 1y ago
      Thanks for asking this because for a moment I thought I was too dense to read this correctly
- fragmede 1y ago
  In life, it helps to be skeptical, so the real question is where do I find real life humans to ask about their experiences? And even then, they could still be paid actors. Though, I've often wondered how would that work. Like, the marketing department staffed by hot people finds developers and then offers to Venmo them $500 to write something nice online about the product? It's a big Internet, and there's a lot of people on Upwork, so I'm not saying it isn't happening, but I've never gotten an email asking me to write something nice about Claude Code in exchange for a couple of bucks.
_heimdall 1y ago
Its interesting to me that Codex has such high sentiment. I'm definitely an outlier on the more principled end of the spectrum, but I refuse to use OpenAI products. I take issue with the AI industry in general and the hand-wavy approach to risk, but OpenAI really is on another level in my book. While I don't trust the industry's approach to AI development, with OpenAI I don't trust the leaderships' intentions.
- gorjusborg 1y ago
  > Its interesting to me that Codex has such high sentiment. Me too, so much so that I doubt this is legitimate. This blog post is the only place I've seen people 'raving' about codex. Claude Code is the current standard all others are measured against.
  - psandor 1y ago
    It was true until GPT-5. That model hugely improved Codex, so it being comparable with CC is a recent thing.
radial_symmetry 1y ago
If you want to compare Codex and Claude Code side by side you can do it in Crystal in worktrees from one prompt https://github.com/stravu/crystal https://github.com/stravu/crystal
frtime38 1y ago
[dead]
another_twist 1y ago
Regular codex user. Its my typing assistant. Allows me to be the ideas guy when writing software. Codex makes plenty of mistakes when generating large blocks of code but its easier to cleanup and consolidate with a refactoring pass once the typing had been done.
spott 1y ago
I really like codex… but without the ability to launch sub-agents, it kinda struggles with context. The biggest thing I use agents for is getting good search with less context. Codex just struggles when the model needs to search too much because of this. Codex also struggles with too much context: there have been a number of times when it has just ran up on the context limit and couldn’t compact, so you just loose everything since your last message, which has been a lot of lost context/work for me.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
drooby 1y ago
I'm still using cursor and it seems fine. What does CC and Codex offer that's so much better than Cursor. Idgi
- omgitspavel 1y ago
  it has a fatal flaw: 80% of the screen is taken up by the code editor window and a file explorer. Why do you need to waste 80% of your screen on things you don't use anyway?
atlgator 1y ago
It looks like you have not reviewed r/ClaudeAI. This is a much larger subreddit and most of the posts are about Claude Code. Many comparisons of CC vs Codex.
- sunaookami 1y ago
  This sub is full of "vibe coders" that use "prompt engineered" 1000 line prompts with 500 MCPs and then complain that they reach their limit in the first day while using the 200$ max plan.
aiisthefiture 1y ago
Seems like HN is slowly split between “ai sucks” and everyone else who is slowly discovering what it can do, while Twitter is leagues ahead using other tools to build stuff.
prameshbajra 1y ago
For a good month I juggled between Claude Code and Codex CLI and found that Codex CLI did the job better. I recently ditched Claude Code and am currently only using Codex CLI.
k__ 1y ago
Is Aider done for?
- daliusd 1y ago
  No MCP support (https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/pull/3937 https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/pull/3937) makes it less useful than other tools (opencode.ai, Claude Code and etc)
kachapopopow 1y ago
for me I don't understand codex the same way I don't understand gemini. In my day to day tasks the only models that actually do what I want are the antrophic ones all other ones just fall flat on their face most of the time and end up creating more work than antrophic models. I wonder if it's because I tend to abuse my models and constantly tell them that they're stupid
- projektfu 1y ago
  The struggle is real. When you say, "do this but don't do that" and it does "that", you know AGI is only a step away.
velcrovan 1y ago
comparing vibe coding tools based on vibes — makes sense!
d4rkp4ttern 1y ago
I like each at different times in different ways. Now I have both running in separate Tmux panes and have one talk to the other to ask/delegate/verify/validate, using my Tmux-cli tool (now a Claude skill of course): https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools Now my work on a project often spans multiple sessions of these agents. So I use a session-finder and resume/dump tool (also in that repo). I often ask Claude or codex to extract all useful details from a jsonl session log file so I can continue the work.
- mpaepper 1y ago
  What about the security aspects, can it run anything?
  - d4rkp4ttern 1y ago
    I assume by “it” you mean Claude code or codex-cli — that depends on how you launched them or how you modified the permissions within the CLI chat; that’s orthogonal to my CLI tools.

141 points by waprin 1y ago

visiondude 1y ago

Ah bots analyzing bots. Seems openai has a larger bot army than Anthropic rn

aaronSong 1y ago
openai's crawling is the best. just following anthropic's way
candiddevmike 1y ago
Need to go to conferences and actually talk to people to understand what Real People (TM) think of GenAI.
- TheRoque 1y ago
  And what would that be ? Please make me save a plane ticket
  - samhclark 1y ago
    I went to a b-sides yesterday (so: small, local, cybersecurity-focused) where someone described their feelings toward GenAI as "praying for Star Trek, but planning for Terminator." Someone else described AGI as a short term inevitability. Not many others addressed it directly. The vibe I got from offhand remarks was that people felt it was a thing being forced upon them that they are resistant to use.

the_duke 1y ago

In my experience gpt5-codex (medium) and codex-cli is notably better than Sonnet 4.5 and claude-code. (note: never tried Opus) It is slower, but the results are much more often correct and it doesn't rush into half-baked solutions/dumb approaches as eagerly. I'd much rather wait 5 minutes than have to clean up manually or try to coax a model into doing things differently. I also wouldn't be surprised if the slowness was partially due to OpenAI being quite resource constrained. They are repeatedly complaining about not having sufficient compute. Bigger picture: I think all the AI coding environments are incredibly immature. There are many improvements to be unlocked.

ripped_britches 1y ago
That’s falsifiable quite easily by measuring tokens per second. Rather, the real reason codex takes longer is that it does more work to read more context. IMO the results are much better with codex, not even close
fragmede 1y ago
Where codex falls short is in background processing, both running a daemon in the background and using its output as context while simultaneously being interactive for the user, and with subagents, ie, do multiple things in parallel. Presumably codex will catch up, but for now, that puts Claude Code ahead of things for me. As far as which one is better, it's highly dependent on what we're each doing, but I will say that I have this one project where bare "make" won't work, and I have a script that needs to be run instead. I have instructions to call that script in multiple .md files, and codex is able to call the script instead of make, but it keeps forgetting that and tries to run make which fails and it gets confused. (Claude code running on macOS host but build on Linux vm.) I could work around it, but that really takes the "shiny" factor off of codex+GPT-5 for me.
- another_twist 1y ago
  Honestly I think the simplicity of codex to not do anything fancy pants like background coding is what gives it an edge. I am happy to wait for a while and even to repeat context to it (helps me remember stuff anyway) if it types out the right thing.

extr 1y ago

Notice how pricing is the top discussion theme. People love free shit and it's hard to deny codex usage limits are more generous. My 2c for someone who uses both tools pretty consistently in an enterprise context: - Codex-medium is better if you have a well articulated plan you "merely" need to execute on, need help finding a bug, have some specific complex piece of logic you need to tweak, truly need a ton of long range context to reason about an issue. It's great and usage limits are very generous! - Sonnet 4.5 is better for everything else. That means for me: non-coding CLI ops, git ops, writing code with it as a pair programmer, OOD tasks, big new chunks of functionality that are highly conceptual, architectural discussion, etc. I generally approve every edit and often interrupt it. The fast iteration and feedback is key. I probably use CC 80% of the time with Codex the other 20%. My company pays for CC and I don't even look at the cost. Most of my coworkers use CC over Codex. We do find the Codex PR reviewer to be the best of any tool out there. Codex gets a lot of play on twitter also because a lot of the most prolific voices there are solo devs who are "building in public". A greenfield, solo project is the ideal (only?) use case for running 5 agents in parallel or whatever. Codex is probably amazing at that. But it's not practical for building in enterprise contexts IMO.

quintu5 1y ago
For larger tasks that I know are parallelizable, I just tell Claude to figure out which steps can be parallelized and then have it go nuts with sub-agents. I’ve had pretty good success with that.
- DanielAtDev 1y ago
  I need to try this because I've never deliberately told it to, but I've had it do it on it's own before. Now I'm wondering if that project had instructions somewhere about that, which could it explain why it happened.
  - quintu5 1y ago
    It sometimes does it on its own, but to get it to do so consistently, it needs to be told. Doubly so if you want it to split off more than one sub-agent. This works great for refactors that touch a large number of files. You can knock out a refactor that might take 30 minutes, a persistent checklist, and possibly multiple conversations, and one-shot it in two minutes and a single prompt.

kazinator 1y ago

Sucks-Rules-o-Meter, but 2025.

mikeocool 1y ago

Reading the comments and posts about both Claude Code and Codex on Reddit (and often hacker news), it’s hard to imagine they’re not extremely astroturfed. There seems to be constant stream of not terribly interesting or unique “my Claude code/codex success story” blog posts that mange to solicit so many upvotes.

nickstinemates 1y ago
Meanwhile I am talking about unique shit with Claude Code trying to draft on that sentiment for little to no traction with them. We've built the best way to automate and manage production infrastructure using these models and no one gives a shit. It's so weird.
- typpilol 1y ago
  Best according to?
- 100721 1y ago
  > Meanwhile I am talking about unique shit with Claude Code trying to draft on that sentiment for little to no traction with them. What does this mean? What do you mean unique shit? What do you mean when you say you’re trying to draft on the sentiment? What is “them” referring to? Genuinely. I’m not being (deliberately) obtuse, just trying to follow. Thanks
  - malshe 1y ago
    Thanks for asking this because for a moment I thought I was too dense to read this correctly
fragmede 1y ago
In life, it helps to be skeptical, so the real question is where do I find real life humans to ask about their experiences? And even then, they could still be paid actors. Though, I've often wondered how would that work. Like, the marketing department staffed by hot people finds developers and then offers to Venmo them $500 to write something nice online about the product? It's a big Internet, and there's a lot of people on Upwork, so I'm not saying it isn't happening, but I've never gotten an email asking me to write something nice about Claude Code in exchange for a couple of bucks.

_heimdall 1y ago

Its interesting to me that Codex has such high sentiment. I'm definitely an outlier on the more principled end of the spectrum, but I refuse to use OpenAI products. I take issue with the AI industry in general and the hand-wavy approach to risk, but OpenAI really is on another level in my book. While I don't trust the industry's approach to AI development, with OpenAI I don't trust the leaderships' intentions.

gorjusborg 1y ago
> Its interesting to me that Codex has such high sentiment. Me too, so much so that I doubt this is legitimate. This blog post is the only place I've seen people 'raving' about codex. Claude Code is the current standard all others are measured against.
- psandor 1y ago
  It was true until GPT-5. That model hugely improved Codex, so it being comparable with CC is a recent thing.

radial_symmetry 1y ago

If you want to compare Codex and Claude Code side by side you can do it in Crystal in worktrees from one prompt https://github.com/stravu/crystal https://github.com/stravu/crystal

frtime38 1y ago

[dead]

another_twist 1y ago

Regular codex user. Its my typing assistant. Allows me to be the ideas guy when writing software. Codex makes plenty of mistakes when generating large blocks of code but its easier to cleanup and consolidate with a refactoring pass once the typing had been done.

spott 1y ago

I really like codex… but without the ability to launch sub-agents, it kinda struggles with context. The biggest thing I use agents for is getting good search with less context. Codex just struggles when the model needs to search too much because of this. Codex also struggles with too much context: there have been a number of times when it has just ran up on the context limit and couldn’t compact, so you just loose everything since your last message, which has been a lot of lost context/work for me.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

drooby 1y ago

I'm still using cursor and it seems fine. What does CC and Codex offer that's so much better than Cursor. Idgi

omgitspavel 1y ago
it has a fatal flaw: 80% of the screen is taken up by the code editor window and a file explorer. Why do you need to waste 80% of your screen on things you don't use anyway?

atlgator 1y ago

It looks like you have not reviewed r/ClaudeAI. This is a much larger subreddit and most of the posts are about Claude Code. Many comparisons of CC vs Codex.

sunaookami 1y ago
This sub is full of "vibe coders" that use "prompt engineered" 1000 line prompts with 500 MCPs and then complain that they reach their limit in the first day while using the 200$ max plan.

aiisthefiture 1y ago

Seems like HN is slowly split between “ai sucks” and everyone else who is slowly discovering what it can do, while Twitter is leagues ahead using other tools to build stuff.

prameshbajra 1y ago

For a good month I juggled between Claude Code and Codex CLI and found that Codex CLI did the job better. I recently ditched Claude Code and am currently only using Codex CLI.

k__ 1y ago

Is Aider done for?

daliusd 1y ago
No MCP support (https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/pull/3937 https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/pull/3937) makes it less useful than other tools (opencode.ai, Claude Code and etc)

kachapopopow 1y ago

for me I don't understand codex the same way I don't understand gemini. In my day to day tasks the only models that actually do what I want are the antrophic ones all other ones just fall flat on their face most of the time and end up creating more work than antrophic models. I wonder if it's because I tend to abuse my models and constantly tell them that they're stupid

projektfu 1y ago
The struggle is real. When you say, "do this but don't do that" and it does "that", you know AGI is only a step away.

velcrovan 1y ago

comparing vibe coding tools based on vibes — makes sense!

d4rkp4ttern 1y ago

I like each at different times in different ways. Now I have both running in separate Tmux panes and have one talk to the other to ask/delegate/verify/validate, using my Tmux-cli tool (now a Claude skill of course): https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools Now my work on a project often spans multiple sessions of these agents. So I use a session-finder and resume/dump tool (also in that repo). I often ask Claude or codex to extract all useful details from a jsonl session log file so I can continue the work.

mpaepper 1y ago
What about the security aspects, can it run anything?
- d4rkp4ttern 1y ago
  I assume by “it” you mean Claude code or codex-cli — that depends on how you launched them or how you modified the permissions within the CLI chat; that’s orthogonal to my CLI tools.