6 ms·

Can you share an example of the tasks you found Codex being much better? From my experience Claude Code is much better.

mmaunder 1y ago
I can not. We're all racing very hard to take full advantage of these new capabilities before they go mainstream. And to be honest, sharing problem domains that are particularly attractive would be sharing too much. Go forth and experiment. Have fun with it. You'll figure it out pretty fast. You can read my other post here about the kinds of problem spaces I'm looking at.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  Ah, super secret problem domains that have been thoroughly represented in the LLM training data. Nice.
- mmaunder 1y ago
  I'm seeing the downvotes. I'm sorry folks feel that way. I'm regretting my honesty. Edit: I'd like to reply to this comment in particular but can't in a threaded reply, so will do that here: "Ah, super secret problem domains that have been thoroughly represented in the LLM training data. Nice." This exhibits a fundamental misunderstanding of why coding agents powered by LLMs are such a game changer. The assumption this poster is making is that LLMs are regurgitating whole cloth after being trained on whole cloth. This is a common mistake among lay people and non-practitioners. The reality is that LLMs have gained the ability to program, by learning from the code of others. Much like a human would learn from the code of others, and then be able to create a completely novel application. The difference between a human programmer an an agentic coder is that the agent has much broader and deeper expertise across more programming languages, and understands more design patterns, more operating systems, more about programming history, etc etc and it uses all this knowledge to fulfill the task you've set it to. That's not possible for any single human. It's important for the poster to take two realities on board: Firstly, agentic coding agents are not regurgitating whole cloth from whole cloth. Instead they are weaving new creations because they have learned how to program. Secondly, agentic coding agents have broader and deeper knowledge than any human that will ever exist, and they never tire, and their mood and energy level never changes. In fact that improves on a continuous basis as the months go by and progress continues. This means we can, as individual practitioners or fast moving teams, create things that were never before possible for us without raising huge amounts of money and hiring large very expensive teams, and then having the overhead of lining everyone up behind a goal AND dealing with the human issues that arise, including communication overhead. This is a very exciting time. Especially if you're curious, energetic, and are willing to suspend disbelief to go and take a look.
  - kobe_bryant 1y ago
    this is absurd. no one needs or wants your AI generated answer that's a whole lot of nothing
    - mmaunder 1y ago
      Comments like this reveal the magnitude of polarization around this issue in tech circles. Most people actually feel this kind of animosity towards AI, and so having comment threads like this even be visible on HN is unusual. Needless to say, all my comments here are hand written. But the poster knows that, of course.
  - zamadatix 1y ago
    Never hold regret for having honesty, it tends to lose its value completely if you only care about it when you have good news to deliver. If for anything, hold regret for when you didn't have something better appreciated to be honest about. The easier threading-focused approach to the conversation might be to add the additional comment as an edit at the end of the original and reply to the child https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45649068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45649068 directly. Of course, I've broken the ability to do that by responding to you now about it ;).
    - mmaunder 1y ago
      Thanks. I wasn't able to reply in a thread earlier - I guess HN has a throttle on that. So I edited the comment above to add a few more thoughts. It's a very exciting time to be alive.
      - jamiek88 1y ago
        Just click on the time. Where yours says ‘two hours ago’ now, if you click on that you can reply directly to any sub comment in a thread.
    - mmaunder 1y ago
      lol, thanks.
- aprilthird2021 1y ago
  Why would you even comment that Codex CLI is potentially worth switching an enormous amount of spend over ($70k) and give literally 0 evidence of why it's better? That's all you've got? "Trust me bro"?
mordymoop 1y ago
I'm on the same page here. I have seen this sentiment about Codex suddenly being good a few times now, so I booted Codex CLI thinking-high back up after a break and asked it to look for bugs. It promptly found five bugs that didn't actually exist. It was the kind of truly impressively stupid mistake that I haven't seen Claude Code make essentially ever, and made me wonder if this isn't the sort of thing that's making people downplay the power of LLMs for agentic coding.
- stavros 1y ago
  I asked Sonnet 4.5 to find bugs in the code, it found five high-impact bugs that, when I prompted it a second time, it admitted weren't actually bugs. It's definitely not just Codex.
- throwaway-0001 1y ago
  In my case codex fixed a bug in one shot. Took 10 min to debug and find it. Claude struggled long time and still didn’t find.
simplify 1y ago
Same here. I tried codex a few days ago for a very simple task (remove any references of X within this long text string) and it fumbled it pretty hard. Very strange.
- fragmede 1y ago
  yeah I'm in the same boat. Codex can't do this one task, and constantly forgets what I've told it, and I'm reading these comments saying how is so great to the point that I'm wondering if I'm the one taking the crazy pills. Maybe we're being A/B tested and don't know about it?
  - hattmall 1y ago
    No, no one that's super boosting the LLMs ever tells you what they are working on or give any reasonable specifics about how and why it's beneficial. When someone does, it's a fairly narrow scope and typically inline with my experience. They can save you some time by doing some fairly complex basic tasks that you can write in plain language instead of coding. To get good results you really need a lot of underlying knowledge yourself and essentially, I think of it as a translator. I can write a program in very good detail using normal language and then the LLM can convert it to code with reasonable accuracy. I haven't been able to depend on it to do anything remotely advanced. They all make up API endpoints or methods or fill in data with things that simply don't exist, but that's the nature of the model.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      You misread me. I'm one of the people you're complaining about. Claude code has been great in my experience and no I don't have a GitHub repo of code that's been generated for you to tell me that's trivial and unadvanced and that a child could do it. What I'm saying was to compare my experience with Claude code vs Codex with GPT-5. CC's better than codex in my experience, contrary to GP's comment.
  - FuckButtons 1y ago
    Maybe, just maybe, people are lying on the internet. And maybe those people have a financial interest in doing so.
intellectronica 1y ago
Codex works much better for long-running tasks that require a lot of planning and deep understanding. Claude, especially 4.5 Sonnet, is a lot nicer to interact with, so it may be a better choice in cases where you are co-working with the agent. Its output is nicer, it "improvises" really well even if you give it only vague prompts. That's valueable for interactive use. But for delegating complete tasks, Codex is far better. The benchmarks indicate that, as do most practicioners I talk to (and it is indeed my own experience). In my own work, I use Codex for complete end-to-end tasks, and Claude Sonnet for interactive sessions. They're actually quite different.
- shmoogy 1y ago
  Can / Does Codex actually check docker logs and other things for feedback while iterating on something that isnt working ? That is where the true magic of Claude comes for me. Often things cant be one shot, but being able to iteratively check logs, make an adjustment, rebuild the docker containers, send a curl, and confirm fixed is huge improvement.
  - intellectronica 1y ago
    Yes, in this regard it's very similar. It works as an agent and does whatever you need it to do to complete the task. In comparison to Claude it tends to plan more and improvise less.
- incoming1211 1y ago
  I disagree, Codex always gets stuck and wants to double check and clarify things, its like "dammit just execute the plan and don't tell me until its completely finished" The output of codex is also not as great. Codex is great at the planning and investigation portion but sucks at execution and code quality.
  - ewoodrich 1y ago
    I've been dealing with this on Codex a lot lately. It confidently wraps up a task, I go to check it's work... and it's not even close. Then I do a double take and re-read the summary message and realize that it pulled a "and then draw the rest of the owl", seemingly arbitrarily picking and choosing what it felt like doing in that session and what it punted over to "next steps to actually get it running". Claude is more prone to occasional "cheating" with mocked data or "tbd: make this an actual conditional instead of hardcoded If True" stuff when it gets overwhelmed which is annoying and bad. But it at least has strong task adherence for the user's prompt and doesn't make me write a lawyer-esque contract to avoid any loopholes Codex will use to avoid doing work.
the_duke 1y ago
IMO gpt5-codex medium is much better as soon as the task becomes slightly complex, or the context grows a bit. Sora 4.5 tends to randomly hallucinate odd/inappropriate decisions and goes to make stupid changes that have to be patched up manually.
- jacurtis 1y ago
  Yes Sora hallucinates significantly more than Claude. I find that Codex generally requires me to remove code to get to what I want, whereas Claude I tend to use what it gives me and I add to it. Whether this is from additional prompting or from manual typing, i just find that codex requires removal to get to desired state, and Claude requires adding to get to desired state. I prefer adding incrementally than removing.
Palmik 1y ago
Curiously, you yourself did not provide an example where, from your experience, Claude Code was much ebtter.

I can not. We're all racing very hard to take full advantage of these new capabilities before they go mainstream. And to be honest, sharing problem domains that are particularly attractive would be sharing too much. Go forth and experiment. Have fun with it. You'll figure it out pretty fast. You can read my other post here about the kinds of problem spaces I'm looking at.

deadbabe 1y ago
Ah, super secret problem domains that have been thoroughly represented in the LLM training data. Nice.
mmaunder 1y ago
I'm seeing the downvotes. I'm sorry folks feel that way. I'm regretting my honesty. Edit: I'd like to reply to this comment in particular but can't in a threaded reply, so will do that here: "Ah, super secret problem domains that have been thoroughly represented in the LLM training data. Nice." This exhibits a fundamental misunderstanding of why coding agents powered by LLMs are such a game changer. The assumption this poster is making is that LLMs are regurgitating whole cloth after being trained on whole cloth. This is a common mistake among lay people and non-practitioners. The reality is that LLMs have gained the ability to program, by learning from the code of others. Much like a human would learn from the code of others, and then be able to create a completely novel application. The difference between a human programmer an an agentic coder is that the agent has much broader and deeper expertise across more programming languages, and understands more design patterns, more operating systems, more about programming history, etc etc and it uses all this knowledge to fulfill the task you've set it to. That's not possible for any single human. It's important for the poster to take two realities on board: Firstly, agentic coding agents are not regurgitating whole cloth from whole cloth. Instead they are weaving new creations because they have learned how to program. Secondly, agentic coding agents have broader and deeper knowledge than any human that will ever exist, and they never tire, and their mood and energy level never changes. In fact that improves on a continuous basis as the months go by and progress continues. This means we can, as individual practitioners or fast moving teams, create things that were never before possible for us without raising huge amounts of money and hiring large very expensive teams, and then having the overhead of lining everyone up behind a goal AND dealing with the human issues that arise, including communication overhead. This is a very exciting time. Especially if you're curious, energetic, and are willing to suspend disbelief to go and take a look.
- kobe_bryant 1y ago
  this is absurd. no one needs or wants your AI generated answer that's a whole lot of nothing
  - mmaunder 1y ago
    Comments like this reveal the magnitude of polarization around this issue in tech circles. Most people actually feel this kind of animosity towards AI, and so having comment threads like this even be visible on HN is unusual. Needless to say, all my comments here are hand written. But the poster knows that, of course.
- zamadatix 1y ago
  Never hold regret for having honesty, it tends to lose its value completely if you only care about it when you have good news to deliver. If for anything, hold regret for when you didn't have something better appreciated to be honest about. The easier threading-focused approach to the conversation might be to add the additional comment as an edit at the end of the original and reply to the child https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45649068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45649068 directly. Of course, I've broken the ability to do that by responding to you now about it ;).
  - mmaunder 1y ago
    Thanks. I wasn't able to reply in a thread earlier - I guess HN has a throttle on that. So I edited the comment above to add a few more thoughts. It's a very exciting time to be alive.
    - jamiek88 1y ago
      Just click on the time. Where yours says ‘two hours ago’ now, if you click on that you can reply directly to any sub comment in a thread.
  - mmaunder 1y ago
    lol, thanks.
aprilthird2021 1y ago
Why would you even comment that Codex CLI is potentially worth switching an enormous amount of spend over ($70k) and give literally 0 evidence of why it's better? That's all you've got? "Trust me bro"?

mordymoop 1y ago

I'm on the same page here. I have seen this sentiment about Codex suddenly being good a few times now, so I booted Codex CLI thinking-high back up after a break and asked it to look for bugs. It promptly found five bugs that didn't actually exist. It was the kind of truly impressively stupid mistake that I haven't seen Claude Code make essentially ever, and made me wonder if this isn't the sort of thing that's making people downplay the power of LLMs for agentic coding.

stavros 1y ago
I asked Sonnet 4.5 to find bugs in the code, it found five high-impact bugs that, when I prompted it a second time, it admitted weren't actually bugs. It's definitely not just Codex.
throwaway-0001 1y ago
In my case codex fixed a bug in one shot. Took 10 min to debug and find it. Claude struggled long time and still didn’t find.

simplify 1y ago

Same here. I tried codex a few days ago for a very simple task (remove any references of X within this long text string) and it fumbled it pretty hard. Very strange.

fragmede 1y ago
yeah I'm in the same boat. Codex can't do this one task, and constantly forgets what I've told it, and I'm reading these comments saying how is so great to the point that I'm wondering if I'm the one taking the crazy pills. Maybe we're being A/B tested and don't know about it?
- hattmall 1y ago
  No, no one that's super boosting the LLMs ever tells you what they are working on or give any reasonable specifics about how and why it's beneficial. When someone does, it's a fairly narrow scope and typically inline with my experience. They can save you some time by doing some fairly complex basic tasks that you can write in plain language instead of coding. To get good results you really need a lot of underlying knowledge yourself and essentially, I think of it as a translator. I can write a program in very good detail using normal language and then the LLM can convert it to code with reasonable accuracy. I haven't been able to depend on it to do anything remotely advanced. They all make up API endpoints or methods or fill in data with things that simply don't exist, but that's the nature of the model.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    You misread me. I'm one of the people you're complaining about. Claude code has been great in my experience and no I don't have a GitHub repo of code that's been generated for you to tell me that's trivial and unadvanced and that a child could do it. What I'm saying was to compare my experience with Claude code vs Codex with GPT-5. CC's better than codex in my experience, contrary to GP's comment.
- FuckButtons 1y ago
  Maybe, just maybe, people are lying on the internet. And maybe those people have a financial interest in doing so.

intellectronica 1y ago

Codex works much better for long-running tasks that require a lot of planning and deep understanding. Claude, especially 4.5 Sonnet, is a lot nicer to interact with, so it may be a better choice in cases where you are co-working with the agent. Its output is nicer, it "improvises" really well even if you give it only vague prompts. That's valueable for interactive use. But for delegating complete tasks, Codex is far better. The benchmarks indicate that, as do most practicioners I talk to (and it is indeed my own experience). In my own work, I use Codex for complete end-to-end tasks, and Claude Sonnet for interactive sessions. They're actually quite different.

shmoogy 1y ago
Can / Does Codex actually check docker logs and other things for feedback while iterating on something that isnt working ? That is where the true magic of Claude comes for me. Often things cant be one shot, but being able to iteratively check logs, make an adjustment, rebuild the docker containers, send a curl, and confirm fixed is huge improvement.
- intellectronica 1y ago
  Yes, in this regard it's very similar. It works as an agent and does whatever you need it to do to complete the task. In comparison to Claude it tends to plan more and improvise less.
incoming1211 1y ago
I disagree, Codex always gets stuck and wants to double check and clarify things, its like "dammit just execute the plan and don't tell me until its completely finished" The output of codex is also not as great. Codex is great at the planning and investigation portion but sucks at execution and code quality.
- ewoodrich 1y ago
  I've been dealing with this on Codex a lot lately. It confidently wraps up a task, I go to check it's work... and it's not even close. Then I do a double take and re-read the summary message and realize that it pulled a "and then draw the rest of the owl", seemingly arbitrarily picking and choosing what it felt like doing in that session and what it punted over to "next steps to actually get it running". Claude is more prone to occasional "cheating" with mocked data or "tbd: make this an actual conditional instead of hardcoded If True" stuff when it gets overwhelmed which is annoying and bad. But it at least has strong task adherence for the user's prompt and doesn't make me write a lawyer-esque contract to avoid any loopholes Codex will use to avoid doing work.

the_duke 1y ago

IMO gpt5-codex medium is much better as soon as the task becomes slightly complex, or the context grows a bit. Sora 4.5 tends to randomly hallucinate odd/inappropriate decisions and goes to make stupid changes that have to be patched up manually.

jacurtis 1y ago
Yes Sora hallucinates significantly more than Claude. I find that Codex generally requires me to remove code to get to what I want, whereas Claude I tend to use what it gives me and I add to it. Whether this is from additional prompting or from manual typing, i just find that codex requires removal to get to desired state, and Claude requires adding to get to desired state. I prefer adding incrementally than removing.

Palmik 1y ago

Curiously, you yourself did not provide an example where, from your experience, Claude Code was much ebtter.