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Codex vs. Claude Code (today)

104 points by gmays 11mo ago

N_Lens 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  Exactly my thoughts. Most of these posts are what I'll say "paid posts".
- pitched 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  Yeah. I can excuse bad writing, I can tolerate evangelism. I don't have patience for both.
  - mergesort 11mo ago
    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 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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  > 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 11mo ago
    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.
- deleted 11mo ago
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- mergesort 11mo ago
  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.
CjHuber 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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 https://github.com/just-every/code
  - CjHuber 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
  > with people already asking about a fix for months. OpenAI needs to get access to Claude Code to fix them :)
- dist-epoch 11mo ago
  The general consensus today is that ToDo tool is obsolete and lowers performance for frontier models (Opus 4.5, GPT-5.2)
AbrahamParangi 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    Skills, MCPs, /commands, agents, hooks, plugins, etc. I package https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ 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 11mo ago
      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 11mo ago
        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 https://developers.openai.com/codex/skills
- 11mo ago
motoboi 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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. :)
deleted 11mo ago
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sixhobbits 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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 https://plinky.app [^2]: https://github.com/mergesort/Boutique https://github.com/mergesort/Boutique [^3]: https://build.ms https://build.ms [^4]: https://gist.github.com/mergesort/04a77c47ea4cb6433aa9ade4e1dd4506 https://gist.github.com/mergesort/04a77c47ea4cb6433aa9ade4e1...
Rperry2174 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      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 11mo ago
  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.
lmeyerov 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  Anthropic is partnered with Palantir though…
  - ChicagoDave 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      In my experience sonnet > opus, so it’s not surprise you don’t “need” opus. They charge a premium on sonnet now instead
pshirshov 11mo ago
On hard projects (really hard, like https://github.com/7mind/jopa https://github.com/7mind/jopa), Codex fails spectacularly. The only competition is Claude vs Gemini 3 Pro.
funnyfoobar 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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.
  - funnyfoobar 11mo ago
    Thanks for the clarification. personally it would be too difficult for me to understand large chunks of work, like in your case "a week's worth of code" at a time. just wondering how do you go about it? second, how do you pass such large PR's to your co-workers?(if you have any)
cherryteastain 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  Opus IS included in Pro plan.
- throwawaybla73 11mo ago
  Opus 4.5 is included in the Pro plan.
  - cherryteastain 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
  Both Claude Pro and Google Antigravity free tier have Opus 4.5
- oldandboring 11mo ago
  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.
btbuildem 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
> You’ve got your CLAUDE.md, Skills, Agents, MCP, slash commands, and so much more. How many people use none of this?
- mergesort 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    > 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
    - mergesort 11mo ago
      So I definitely understand where you're coming from, but let me provide a little bit of context. The workshops are 3-4 hours and we do spend a lot of time discussing how things work in reality vs. how they work in the context of the workshop. It's worth noting that these workshops span the gamut of non-technical people in sales to seasoned developers, so a lot of people simply won't learn much (or have the excitement to learn on their own) if we spend the first 2-3 hours setting things up. In my experience the heaviest lift for teaching practically any technical subject is getting someone interested by showing them how to accomplish something they care about, and then leaving them with lots of information and resources so they can continue experimenting and growing even once we're done. The way I do that is to make sure they leave the workshop having built their own idea — without taking shortcuts! Being able to use Codex to accomplish something because you spent an hour crafting a good prompt isn't cheating, it's learning the skill of becoming a better technical communicator — in a short period of time — and taking advantage of the skill you've just learned. I don't consider that magic, it's actually the core tenant of building with AI, and is very much how I work with AI every day. I'm late for dinner so I should probably stop here, so I'll leave just one final note. After every workshop I send each student a list of personalized resources that will help them continue on their journey by demystifying things that we may have glossed over or weren't clear in the workshop — so they should be armed with the tools to take their next steps away from any magical thinking. It's a bit hard to boil down exactly what I do and how I try to design for best hands-on pedagogical practices in an HN post I'm writing on the go — but I am absolutely open to your thoughts! :)
josefrichter 11mo ago
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?
- mergesort 11mo ago
  Hey Jose, author here! That's a great call out. I write predominantly in Swift and for a long time Claude was the only usable option. But sometime around GPT-5 OpenAI's models got much better at Swift, so the choice started becoming more about aesthetics (as a descriptor of preferences). So you're right — if the model can't write coherent code then it doesn't matter what kind of flow you feel as you're working with the tools — but I do imagine this will continue to improve for all languages including Elixir.
  - CharlesW 11mo ago
    > I write predominantly in Swift… If it's okay to mention my own project, I'd appreciate it if you could check out https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ (open source) and let me know what you think. It's focused on modern Swift, with specialized skills for helping developers get to strict Swift 6 concurrency.
    - mergesort 11mo ago
      I've only skimmed it since I'm between Christmas and a longer vacation that starts in 24 hours, but this actually looks really neat! I'll definitely take a closer look to at these skills in depth — but this is exactly the kind of thing I've been telling people to take the time to invest in for their agentic environments. :)
BugsJustFindMe 11mo ago
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.
onehair 11mo ago
Article started really strong, and I was about to believe. Days and weeks worth of code in a matter of minutes? I'm ready. Then author describes a website theme toggle feature. Get out of here!!!!
- mergesort 11mo ago
  Hey there, post author here. I do actually generate days worth of code in minutes and weeks worth of code in hours (not minutes) — but didn't really cover them because this post was more conceptual than specifically covering a tactic or technique as other posts do. But in case you're interested a talk that I gave in Spain this year just went live yesterday, and discusses not only real world use cases but also discusses a lot of the fundamentals of how these AI systems work to make that possible. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLztE34GS_piKKQ6y1dkkuhW76jLBHm3NV https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLztE34GS_piKKQ6y1dkku...
- mergesort 11mo ago
  Hey there, article author here! I spent a lot of time writing up a comment that talks through my process so I'll just lazy link it here if that's ok. [^1] But the truth is I do build real production features all the time! That just wasn't the focus of this article. :) [^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46399123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46399123

104 points by gmays 11mo ago

N_Lens 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
Exactly my thoughts. Most of these posts are what I'll say "paid posts".
pitched 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
Yeah. I can excuse bad writing, I can tolerate evangelism. I don't have patience for both.
- mergesort 11mo ago
  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 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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
> 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 11mo ago
  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.
deleted 11mo ago
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mergesort 11mo ago
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.

CjHuber 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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 https://github.com/just-every/code
- CjHuber 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
> with people already asking about a fix for months. OpenAI needs to get access to Claude Code to fix them :)
dist-epoch 11mo ago
The general consensus today is that ToDo tool is obsolete and lowers performance for frontier models (Opus 4.5, GPT-5.2)

AbrahamParangi 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  Skills, MCPs, /commands, agents, hooks, plugins, etc. I package https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ 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 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      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 https://developers.openai.com/codex/skills
11mo ago

motoboi 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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. :)

deleted 11mo ago

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sixhobbits 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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 https://plinky.app [^2]: https://github.com/mergesort/Boutique https://github.com/mergesort/Boutique [^3]: https://build.ms https://build.ms [^4]: https://gist.github.com/mergesort/04a77c47ea4cb6433aa9ade4e1dd4506 https://gist.github.com/mergesort/04a77c47ea4cb6433aa9ade4e1...

Rperry2174 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
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.

lmeyerov 11mo ago

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 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
Anthropic is partnered with Palantir though…
- ChicagoDave 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    In my experience sonnet > opus, so it’s not surprise you don’t “need” opus. They charge a premium on sonnet now instead

pshirshov 11mo ago

On hard projects (really hard, like https://github.com/7mind/jopa https://github.com/7mind/jopa), Codex fails spectacularly. The only competition is Claude vs Gemini 3 Pro.

funnyfoobar 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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.
- funnyfoobar 11mo ago
  Thanks for the clarification. personally it would be too difficult for me to understand large chunks of work, like in your case "a week's worth of code" at a time. just wondering how do you go about it? second, how do you pass such large PR's to your co-workers?(if you have any)

cherryteastain 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
Opus IS included in Pro plan.
throwawaybla73 11mo ago
Opus 4.5 is included in the Pro plan.
- cherryteastain 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
Both Claude Pro and Google Antigravity free tier have Opus 4.5
oldandboring 11mo ago
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.

btbuildem 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago

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 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago

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 11mo ago

> You’ve got your CLAUDE.md, Skills, Agents, MCP, slash commands, and so much more. How many people use none of this?

mergesort 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  > 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
  - mergesort 11mo ago
    So I definitely understand where you're coming from, but let me provide a little bit of context. The workshops are 3-4 hours and we do spend a lot of time discussing how things work in reality vs. how they work in the context of the workshop. It's worth noting that these workshops span the gamut of non-technical people in sales to seasoned developers, so a lot of people simply won't learn much (or have the excitement to learn on their own) if we spend the first 2-3 hours setting things up. In my experience the heaviest lift for teaching practically any technical subject is getting someone interested by showing them how to accomplish something they care about, and then leaving them with lots of information and resources so they can continue experimenting and growing even once we're done. The way I do that is to make sure they leave the workshop having built their own idea — without taking shortcuts! Being able to use Codex to accomplish something because you spent an hour crafting a good prompt isn't cheating, it's learning the skill of becoming a better technical communicator — in a short period of time — and taking advantage of the skill you've just learned. I don't consider that magic, it's actually the core tenant of building with AI, and is very much how I work with AI every day. I'm late for dinner so I should probably stop here, so I'll leave just one final note. After every workshop I send each student a list of personalized resources that will help them continue on their journey by demystifying things that we may have glossed over or weren't clear in the workshop — so they should be armed with the tools to take their next steps away from any magical thinking. It's a bit hard to boil down exactly what I do and how I try to design for best hands-on pedagogical practices in an HN post I'm writing on the go — but I am absolutely open to your thoughts! :)

josefrichter 11mo ago

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?

mergesort 11mo ago
Hey Jose, author here! That's a great call out. I write predominantly in Swift and for a long time Claude was the only usable option. But sometime around GPT-5 OpenAI's models got much better at Swift, so the choice started becoming more about aesthetics (as a descriptor of preferences). So you're right — if the model can't write coherent code then it doesn't matter what kind of flow you feel as you're working with the tools — but I do imagine this will continue to improve for all languages including Elixir.
- CharlesW 11mo ago
  > I write predominantly in Swift… If it's okay to mention my own project, I'd appreciate it if you could check out https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ (open source) and let me know what you think. It's focused on modern Swift, with specialized skills for helping developers get to strict Swift 6 concurrency.
  - mergesort 11mo ago
    I've only skimmed it since I'm between Christmas and a longer vacation that starts in 24 hours, but this actually looks really neat! I'll definitely take a closer look to at these skills in depth — but this is exactly the kind of thing I've been telling people to take the time to invest in for their agentic environments. :)

BugsJustFindMe 11mo ago

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.

onehair 11mo ago

Article started really strong, and I was about to believe. Days and weeks worth of code in a matter of minutes? I'm ready. Then author describes a website theme toggle feature. Get out of here!!!!

mergesort 11mo ago
Hey there, post author here. I do actually generate days worth of code in minutes and weeks worth of code in hours (not minutes) — but didn't really cover them because this post was more conceptual than specifically covering a tactic or technique as other posts do. But in case you're interested a talk that I gave in Spain this year just went live yesterday, and discusses not only real world use cases but also discusses a lot of the fundamentals of how these AI systems work to make that possible. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLztE34GS_piKKQ6y1dkkuhW76jLBHm3NV https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLztE34GS_piKKQ6y1dkku...
mergesort 11mo ago
Hey there, article author here! I spent a lot of time writing up a comment that talks through my process so I'll just lazy link it here if that's ok. [^1] But the truth is I do build real production features all the time! That just wasn't the focus of this article. :) [^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46399123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46399123