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Codex has arguably been better than Claude Code for months now, but it's flown under the radar because it just didn't capture the same viral marketing effect an

by nilkn 3mo ago

Codex has arguably been better than Claude Code for months now, but it's flown under the radar because it just didn't capture the same viral marketing effect and OpenAI in general has had more optics / PR issues than Anthropic amongst the online developer crowd. I use the word "better" not in the sense that the underlying GPT models are fundamentally smarter or more intelligent, but rather that as a product Codex is just simpler, cheaper, and abundantly reliable and low-drama.

hk__2 3mo ago
I’d argue the opposite. I’ve switched back and forth from one to the other and Opus/Fable has been constantly better than any GPT in my daily work. It’s a bit slower but it does the things right, with as little code as possible, some comments where needed. Codex is faster but you always have to correct it because it got something wrong; it writes tons of code ("let me add a small helper") with obvious comments.
- nilkn 3mo ago
  I'm not sure how meaningful this is. Fable only just recently become more broadly available, and GPT-5.6 is launching broadly today.
  - hk__2 3mo ago
    The comment I was responding to was talking about Codex usage in the past few months. This is a general feeling about Codex with Claude, not a model-to-model comparison.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
- ljm 3mo ago
  Purely anecdotally the one persistent issue I have with LLMs writing code is that they are absolutely paranoid and add a load of indirection and defensive crap and even if you prompt to avoid that it will often require manual steering to remove the cruft.
  - adastra22 3mo ago
    I have not noticed this with Opus 4.6+. The result is usually not too far from what I would have written myself.
    - epolanski 3mo ago
      Opus 4.6 was the best model in the family, following two ones were seriously brain damaged to do well on benchmarks.
      - techflowz 3mo ago
        yeah those have been horrible
        epolanski 3mo ago
        I wouldn't say terrible-terrible but only better at from-prompt-to-solution rather than interactive discussing and problem solving. I tend to define it "better at solving, worse at assisting phenomenon". Which doesn't properly show on benchmarks that only focus on the solving part.
  - hk__2 3mo ago
    I’ve experienced this with GPT but not with Opus/Fable.
    - rustystump 3mo ago
      I experience it with everything including opus/fable. Though my feeling, no proof, is that the opus/fable today is not what it was months ago. there was a time for about a month where opus was incredible. Just incredible but as fable started to move out i swear to god it feels like sonnet now. Fable feels like opus used to but costs more.
  - pdantix 3mo ago
    recent gpts are horrendous for this, whereas recent claudes have a tic where they incessantly add useless comments referring to previous changes and will use multiple single-line comments instead of a standard multi-line docblock.
- cevn 3mo ago
  Sounds like you are talking past each other. GP is saying the harness of codex is higher quality, which I can believe, even if the models are not as good as Opus/Fable.
  - phoghed 3mo ago
    GPT-5.5 is as good though, at least according to my personal experience and DeepSWE
    - noobcoder 3mo ago
      yes, much faster, more token efficient and quality is also similar
  - oh_no 3mo ago
    i don't think so, i think it's 50% what work people are doing, 50% vibes. my experience with 5.5 is i like it more and get better results than 4.8/fable. which isn't to say i think it's a strictly better model, just been working better for me.
    - albedoa 3mo ago
      What do you mean "i don't think so"? What is it about the comment you are replying to that you don't think?
  - mingqiz 3mo ago
    It's the other way actually. Cc is a better harness but gpt models are just so much better in my personal experience (at least for backend) ever since 5.4.
- dbbk 3mo ago
  I really love the Opus/Fable models but I'm honestly sick to death of the buggy product. The CLI always has some weird issue. Right now it doesn't even output messages before tool calls, it just swallows them and they disappear. I don't like OpenAI as a company, but they appear to have QA, and that is probably enough to get me to switch.
  - walthamstow 3mo ago
    There was an issue on Claude Code the other day where it would only wait 60 seconds when it had asked a set of questions, then if it didn't get a response from the user it would just continue however it thought was best. Completely unusable. It took them nearly 48 hours to merge a fix.
    - trvz 3mo ago
      That sounds intentional though.
      - dbbk 3mo ago
        Yes it was an intentionally added feature, that was extremely bad.
  - pqdbr 3mo ago
    Glad I’m not the only one noticing this. It’s maddening.
  - verve_rat 3mo ago
    Using remote control I will choose a model but Claude will always revert to Haiku for the first turn. Basic stuff about features that are more than a week old just get no attention at all. From the outside Athropic seems to be a clear feature factory.
  - stpedgwdgfhgdd 3mo ago
    Same for me, that is why I switched to Pi. I still use Sonnet or Opus, but mainly GPT due to cost.
- behnamoh 3mo ago
  > Codex is faster but you always have to correct it because it got something wrong this has been my experience with Codex as well, and I have to fix its mistakes every single time. But recently, I literally threw away three hours of work because it kept adding hundreds of lines to my code base. When I restarted the entire work using Fable and Opus, it was like night and day.
- dimitrios1 3mo ago
  I have both as well. I trust the output of Claude to a higher degree than what I get with Codex. I always have claude review codex output. That being said, I find gpt 5.5 more generically useful at a wider breadth of tasks. Straight coding though, it's no contest. Obligatory YMMV, maybe your prompting style fits gpt better. We forget that this matters a lot
- epolanski 3mo ago
  [dead]
- davedx 3mo ago
  A bit slower? I think for most of my tasks, Claude takes easily 2x longer for almost everything, even things like just analyzing code. It churns tons of tokens for quite simple things. IMO that's exactly why it's a bit better at actual problem solving. You absolutely do not "always have to correct" Codex. I'm not sure what you're doing, but I'd say 80-90% of its edits on my side it doesn't need any revisions.
jrflo 3mo ago
Agreed. GPT 5.5 will come up with more straightforward solutions with far fewer tokens than Claude. Also, the usage limits are much more generous for Codex than Claude Code for the same monthly plan.
- mattmanser 3mo ago
  Last time I used Codex it would make loads of assumptions, often quite big ones, without asking. Did they fix that, as that for me was what actually made codex worse.
  - arcanemachiner 3mo ago
    I find that I have to tell GPT and Claude to keep asking me questions, or they will just fill in the gaps themselves (wrongly).
    - dboreham 3mo ago
      My experience has been that Claude/Opus will ask me questions, although sometimes I have to step in and redirect a bit. Codex/GPT just dives in and cranks code out, which after using Claude for a year I found rather concerning. It wrote working code though. Claude/Fable does something similar (asks far fewer questions than Opus) fwiw.
  - nico1207 3mo ago
    Did you use plan mode?
- mikeshi42 3mo ago
  I've been using both and as far as I can tell with ccusage, the $ equivalent budgets are about the same between them now. This may have been true before anthropic doubled their quotas and openai 2x promo expired last month.
  - SmolSpideritito 3mo ago
    How are you finding it now? I have been deciding between 20 dollar subscriptions for GPT, Claude, and Cursor (Grok 4.5) respectively
dboreham 3mo ago
Nudged by this thread, I've decided to switch from Claude to Codex for a bit to see what happens. But...I immediately became lost in their marketing vortex of confusion on plans and pricing. Anyone care to tell me which plan I should be using? On the other side I use the $100 Claude Code plan. We actually have a "Business" ChatGPT subscription already, which seems to be $50/mo/seat. OpenAI's web site offers a set of individual subscriptions (for parity with CC presumably) which I suspect weren't available when we signed up for ChatGPT. I think that in turn happened due to some web site feature it didn't allow for free users (uploading PDFs, something like that). Perhaps I should switch from that business account to an individual subscription for Codex?
- gruntled-worker 3mo ago
  Test-drive it with an individual Pro account (5x or 20x) for a month. Download the Codex CLI client from https://github.com/openai/codex https://github.com/openai/codex and auth it in the browser via the URL it provides. Set the model to 5.6-Sol and effort to max.
  - dboreham 3mo ago
    Ok thanks. Executed on that. I had it build a simple project (actually not so simple since it involved domain knowledge about snowpack and ice) and also gave the same prompt to Opus and to Fable. When I get some spare time I'll write an article highlighting the differences between all three.
Certhas 3mo ago
That's a strange statement... It's been true for a while now that OpenAI has had much more generous limits than Anthropic on their subscription plans. And with the Fable ban/guardrails disaster, there has been a lot of frustration from people in these comment sections. And Anthropic fucked up Claude Code pretty badly for a couple of weeks during the 4.6/4.7/4.8 transition, which again was widely publicized. And they got a lot of flack over not allowing other harnesses anymore. And ChatGPT got some pretty viral wins on model intelligence when they cracked the high profile Erdos problem. If anything the online optics have been bad for Anthropic for the last half year. OpenAI doesn't have optics issues, from my point of view they simply have the issue that they are the least trustworthy player at the frontier. The way they pivoted from their original mission is truly breathtaking, especially coming in gloatingly to take the government contract when Anthropic got kicked out for insisting the government does not use their systems for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons systems. You understand what that means, right? OpenAI models are now actively used/developed for mass surveilance and/or autonomous weapons systems. I know there are plenty here who seem to value their own ability to use these models cheaply above all other considerations. Then OpenAI is a great choice, and much less restrictive than Anthropic. But their problem is not on the optics. It's on the substance.
nolok 3mo ago
I really want a good Claude Design competitor in Codex, it's hard to use the others after getting used to it and yet I find anthropic's model to have a much worse understanding of what looks good or not than OpenAI or Google models.
- sneezychl 3mo ago
  Anthropic's models are downright terrible at visual reasoning and design. Gemini is fantastic, however.
ramijames 3mo ago
What about cost?
Trasmatta 3mo ago
Switched to Codex last week, and I'm already MUCH happier than I have been with Claude Code. Which surprised me.
dyauspitr 3mo ago
Honestly it’s the usage limits that are so generous that makes codex worth it even if it may not be exactly as powerful as Claude. The peace of mind that you can try a lot of things and make huge refactors and run extensive redundant tests without running out of tokens just makes the whole thing a much better experience. I tried coding with Deepseek and it was pretty terrible so the only reason codex works is because its abilities are close to or on par with Claude.
- Scoundreller 3mo ago
  > I tried coding with Deepseek But soooooo cheap. Especially for those of us where a monthly sub doesn’t make sense.
  - dyauspitr 3mo ago
    There almost no scenario in which the sub doesn’t make sense unless you write code once a week or something. Even then you’re better off with the lowest tier $20 plan.
    - Scoundreller 3mo ago
      That’s me. I’ve gone through $2 on deepseek in a month as i’m doing 1 project.
herpdyderp 3mo ago
I keep trying Codex and it constantly produces terrible output compared to Opus. I don’t understand how my results are so bad?
davedx 3mo ago
I agree with this statement. And because it churns less tokens, it's just generally faster too - noticeably, throughout the day, across a range of tasks I get more shit done with Codex. It's not better at reasoning on complex coding tasks, Claude Opus is still ahead there, but not by a lot.
beefsack 3mo ago
I'd say Codex and Claude Code have different strengths and weaknesses. Claude Code is significantly better in terms of their subagent UI for example - being able to see the list of subagents under the input is great. To be honest though, I've gotten to the point where I prefer the OpenCode UI. A big win for OpenAI is you can log in to your subscription in OpenCode, whereas this is not trivially achievable for a Claude subscription. I was getting some really impressive cost efficiency today in OpenCode with the following: * Main session agent: gpt-5.6-sol (high) via OpenAI subscription * General purpose subagent: deepseek-v4-pro (high) via OpenCode Go subscription * Using `obra/superpowers` for subagent driven workflows * The main session only being allowed filesystem read permissions and everything else delegated It was absolutely crunching through tasks without hitting the limit, and this combination is quite cost effective. GPT 5.6 was picking up on quality and functional issues from DeepSeek and having it resolve them cleanly, and I didn't even get close to my quotas whereas I can usually blast through them. I feel as people get more comfortable with subagents and mixing and matching models in their daily work, Anthropic's walled garden stance will start to hurt them.

by nilkn 3mo ago

hk__2 3mo ago

I’d argue the opposite. I’ve switched back and forth from one to the other and Opus/Fable has been constantly better than any GPT in my daily work. It’s a bit slower but it does the things right, with as little code as possible, some comments where needed. Codex is faster but you always have to correct it because it got something wrong; it writes tons of code ("let me add a small helper") with obvious comments.

nilkn 3mo ago
I'm not sure how meaningful this is. Fable only just recently become more broadly available, and GPT-5.6 is launching broadly today.
- hk__2 3mo ago
  The comment I was responding to was talking about Codex usage in the past few months. This is a general feeling about Codex with Claude, not a model-to-model comparison.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
ljm 3mo ago
Purely anecdotally the one persistent issue I have with LLMs writing code is that they are absolutely paranoid and add a load of indirection and defensive crap and even if you prompt to avoid that it will often require manual steering to remove the cruft.
- adastra22 3mo ago
  I have not noticed this with Opus 4.6+. The result is usually not too far from what I would have written myself.
  - epolanski 3mo ago
    Opus 4.6 was the best model in the family, following two ones were seriously brain damaged to do well on benchmarks.
    - techflowz 3mo ago
      yeah those have been horrible
      - epolanski 3mo ago
        I wouldn't say terrible-terrible but only better at from-prompt-to-solution rather than interactive discussing and problem solving. I tend to define it "better at solving, worse at assisting phenomenon". Which doesn't properly show on benchmarks that only focus on the solving part.
- hk__2 3mo ago
  I’ve experienced this with GPT but not with Opus/Fable.
  - rustystump 3mo ago
    I experience it with everything including opus/fable. Though my feeling, no proof, is that the opus/fable today is not what it was months ago. there was a time for about a month where opus was incredible. Just incredible but as fable started to move out i swear to god it feels like sonnet now. Fable feels like opus used to but costs more.
- pdantix 3mo ago
  recent gpts are horrendous for this, whereas recent claudes have a tic where they incessantly add useless comments referring to previous changes and will use multiple single-line comments instead of a standard multi-line docblock.
cevn 3mo ago
Sounds like you are talking past each other. GP is saying the harness of codex is higher quality, which I can believe, even if the models are not as good as Opus/Fable.
- phoghed 3mo ago
  GPT-5.5 is as good though, at least according to my personal experience and DeepSWE
  - noobcoder 3mo ago
    yes, much faster, more token efficient and quality is also similar
- oh_no 3mo ago
  i don't think so, i think it's 50% what work people are doing, 50% vibes. my experience with 5.5 is i like it more and get better results than 4.8/fable. which isn't to say i think it's a strictly better model, just been working better for me.
  - albedoa 3mo ago
    What do you mean "i don't think so"? What is it about the comment you are replying to that you don't think?
- mingqiz 3mo ago
  It's the other way actually. Cc is a better harness but gpt models are just so much better in my personal experience (at least for backend) ever since 5.4.
dbbk 3mo ago
I really love the Opus/Fable models but I'm honestly sick to death of the buggy product. The CLI always has some weird issue. Right now it doesn't even output messages before tool calls, it just swallows them and they disappear. I don't like OpenAI as a company, but they appear to have QA, and that is probably enough to get me to switch.
- walthamstow 3mo ago
  There was an issue on Claude Code the other day where it would only wait 60 seconds when it had asked a set of questions, then if it didn't get a response from the user it would just continue however it thought was best. Completely unusable. It took them nearly 48 hours to merge a fix.
  - trvz 3mo ago
    That sounds intentional though.
    - dbbk 3mo ago
      Yes it was an intentionally added feature, that was extremely bad.
- pqdbr 3mo ago
  Glad I’m not the only one noticing this. It’s maddening.
- verve_rat 3mo ago
  Using remote control I will choose a model but Claude will always revert to Haiku for the first turn. Basic stuff about features that are more than a week old just get no attention at all. From the outside Athropic seems to be a clear feature factory.
- stpedgwdgfhgdd 3mo ago
  Same for me, that is why I switched to Pi. I still use Sonnet or Opus, but mainly GPT due to cost.
behnamoh 3mo ago
> Codex is faster but you always have to correct it because it got something wrong this has been my experience with Codex as well, and I have to fix its mistakes every single time. But recently, I literally threw away three hours of work because it kept adding hundreds of lines to my code base. When I restarted the entire work using Fable and Opus, it was like night and day.
dimitrios1 3mo ago
I have both as well. I trust the output of Claude to a higher degree than what I get with Codex. I always have claude review codex output. That being said, I find gpt 5.5 more generically useful at a wider breadth of tasks. Straight coding though, it's no contest. Obligatory YMMV, maybe your prompting style fits gpt better. We forget that this matters a lot
epolanski 3mo ago
[dead]
davedx 3mo ago
A bit slower? I think for most of my tasks, Claude takes easily 2x longer for almost everything, even things like just analyzing code. It churns tons of tokens for quite simple things. IMO that's exactly why it's a bit better at actual problem solving. You absolutely do not "always have to correct" Codex. I'm not sure what you're doing, but I'd say 80-90% of its edits on my side it doesn't need any revisions.

jrflo 3mo ago

Agreed. GPT 5.5 will come up with more straightforward solutions with far fewer tokens than Claude. Also, the usage limits are much more generous for Codex than Claude Code for the same monthly plan.

mattmanser 3mo ago
Last time I used Codex it would make loads of assumptions, often quite big ones, without asking. Did they fix that, as that for me was what actually made codex worse.
- arcanemachiner 3mo ago
  I find that I have to tell GPT and Claude to keep asking me questions, or they will just fill in the gaps themselves (wrongly).
  - dboreham 3mo ago
    My experience has been that Claude/Opus will ask me questions, although sometimes I have to step in and redirect a bit. Codex/GPT just dives in and cranks code out, which after using Claude for a year I found rather concerning. It wrote working code though. Claude/Fable does something similar (asks far fewer questions than Opus) fwiw.
- nico1207 3mo ago
  Did you use plan mode?
mikeshi42 3mo ago
I've been using both and as far as I can tell with ccusage, the $ equivalent budgets are about the same between them now. This may have been true before anthropic doubled their quotas and openai 2x promo expired last month.
- SmolSpideritito 3mo ago
  How are you finding it now? I have been deciding between 20 dollar subscriptions for GPT, Claude, and Cursor (Grok 4.5) respectively

dboreham 3mo ago

Nudged by this thread, I've decided to switch from Claude to Codex for a bit to see what happens. But...I immediately became lost in their marketing vortex of confusion on plans and pricing. Anyone care to tell me which plan I should be using? On the other side I use the $100 Claude Code plan. We actually have a "Business" ChatGPT subscription already, which seems to be $50/mo/seat. OpenAI's web site offers a set of individual subscriptions (for parity with CC presumably) which I suspect weren't available when we signed up for ChatGPT. I think that in turn happened due to some web site feature it didn't allow for free users (uploading PDFs, something like that). Perhaps I should switch from that business account to an individual subscription for Codex?

gruntled-worker 3mo ago
Test-drive it with an individual Pro account (5x or 20x) for a month. Download the Codex CLI client from https://github.com/openai/codex https://github.com/openai/codex and auth it in the browser via the URL it provides. Set the model to 5.6-Sol and effort to max.
- dboreham 3mo ago
  Ok thanks. Executed on that. I had it build a simple project (actually not so simple since it involved domain knowledge about snowpack and ice) and also gave the same prompt to Opus and to Fable. When I get some spare time I'll write an article highlighting the differences between all three.

Certhas 3mo ago

That's a strange statement... It's been true for a while now that OpenAI has had much more generous limits than Anthropic on their subscription plans. And with the Fable ban/guardrails disaster, there has been a lot of frustration from people in these comment sections. And Anthropic fucked up Claude Code pretty badly for a couple of weeks during the 4.6/4.7/4.8 transition, which again was widely publicized. And they got a lot of flack over not allowing other harnesses anymore. And ChatGPT got some pretty viral wins on model intelligence when they cracked the high profile Erdos problem. If anything the online optics have been bad for Anthropic for the last half year. OpenAI doesn't have optics issues, from my point of view they simply have the issue that they are the least trustworthy player at the frontier. The way they pivoted from their original mission is truly breathtaking, especially coming in gloatingly to take the government contract when Anthropic got kicked out for insisting the government does not use their systems for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons systems. You understand what that means, right? OpenAI models are now actively used/developed for mass surveilance and/or autonomous weapons systems. I know there are plenty here who seem to value their own ability to use these models cheaply above all other considerations. Then OpenAI is a great choice, and much less restrictive than Anthropic. But their problem is not on the optics. It's on the substance.

nolok 3mo ago

I really want a good Claude Design competitor in Codex, it's hard to use the others after getting used to it and yet I find anthropic's model to have a much worse understanding of what looks good or not than OpenAI or Google models.

sneezychl 3mo ago
Anthropic's models are downright terrible at visual reasoning and design. Gemini is fantastic, however.

ramijames 3mo ago

What about cost?

Trasmatta 3mo ago

Switched to Codex last week, and I'm already MUCH happier than I have been with Claude Code. Which surprised me.

dyauspitr 3mo ago

Honestly it’s the usage limits that are so generous that makes codex worth it even if it may not be exactly as powerful as Claude. The peace of mind that you can try a lot of things and make huge refactors and run extensive redundant tests without running out of tokens just makes the whole thing a much better experience. I tried coding with Deepseek and it was pretty terrible so the only reason codex works is because its abilities are close to or on par with Claude.

Scoundreller 3mo ago
> I tried coding with Deepseek But soooooo cheap. Especially for those of us where a monthly sub doesn’t make sense.
- dyauspitr 3mo ago
  There almost no scenario in which the sub doesn’t make sense unless you write code once a week or something. Even then you’re better off with the lowest tier $20 plan.
  - Scoundreller 3mo ago
    That’s me. I’ve gone through $2 on deepseek in a month as i’m doing 1 project.

herpdyderp 3mo ago

I keep trying Codex and it constantly produces terrible output compared to Opus. I don’t understand how my results are so bad?

davedx 3mo ago

I agree with this statement. And because it churns less tokens, it's just generally faster too - noticeably, throughout the day, across a range of tasks I get more shit done with Codex. It's not better at reasoning on complex coding tasks, Claude Opus is still ahead there, but not by a lot.

beefsack 3mo ago

I'd say Codex and Claude Code have different strengths and weaknesses. Claude Code is significantly better in terms of their subagent UI for example - being able to see the list of subagents under the input is great. To be honest though, I've gotten to the point where I prefer the OpenCode UI. A big win for OpenAI is you can log in to your subscription in OpenCode, whereas this is not trivially achievable for a Claude subscription. I was getting some really impressive cost efficiency today in OpenCode with the following: * Main session agent: gpt-5.6-sol (high) via OpenAI subscription * General purpose subagent: deepseek-v4-pro (high) via OpenCode Go subscription * Using `obra/superpowers` for subagent driven workflows * The main session only being allowed filesystem read permissions and everything else delegated It was absolutely crunching through tasks without hitting the limit, and this combination is quite cost effective. GPT 5.6 was picking up on quality and functional issues from DeepSeek and having it resolve them cleanly, and I didn't even get close to my quotas whereas I can usually blast through them. I feel as people get more comfortable with subagents and mixing and matching models in their daily work, Anthropic's walled garden stance will start to hurt them.