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A week of using Codex more than Claude
- beering 2mo ago> Changes created by Codex had fewer comments in Ruby/Ruby on Rails code. I liked that a lot, and I will soon share some experiments I ran on this. Why is fewer comments a good thing?
- rirze 2mo agoClaude is creating verbose comments with recent models and people are are tired of it
- skeledrew 2mo agoThose verbose comments provide context for why something is there way it is, so it can take those decisions in account when making changes in the future.
- rplnt 2mo ago> why something is there way it is It writes out stories describing what isn't there or what used to be there. It's usually not helpful, just noise. It also likes to write it in very verbose AI-styled prose.
- zormino 2mo ago"don't write a goddamn novel" <- I've said this to claude way too many times, nothing you can do actually seems to make it significantly less verbose
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- orwin 2mo agoAnd the way they are written is rather unhelpful: '//this not cosmetic: this css helps the user understand where he should click'. The 'this is not' pattern is useless at best.
- skeledrew 2mo agoIt's likely not helpful to you, but it is to Claude. Basically a memory entry at the exact point of relevance, with the same caveats. One advantage though is it survives cloning, so another using the project benefits.
- rplnt 2mo agoIt's only helpful to Claude in that it wastes more tokens and costs more.
- skeledrew 2mo agoIt does visibly use a few more tokens in the short term. But it hurts Claude's ability in the long term if removed because it has to either think more every time it encounters that section in the code (more invisible thinking tokens used), or there's an increased risk of making a maladaptive change without context. Heck I've been bitten enough times already by it, though more recently it's cross project concern where Claude rediscovers some root cause that was already found and documented (I have it save a centrally-located writeup for things that took serious work to learn, when I remember, but I still need to make that knowledge pool known to other agents/sessions without having to manually prompt each time) elsewhere. Problem is today's LLMs don't have the long term memory that humans have, and so remembering the reason behind a given change/decision has to be preserved in some way if it's non-obvious. Hence why there is {AGENTS|CLAUDE}.md, the auto-memory system, and 1001 variants of memory implementations in the wild. All are trying to ensure that LLMs can have the context they need at the location and time they need it. And you want to block Claude from using a technique that it natively finds helpful.
- amdsn 2mo agoIf they have in mind what I think of when I think of claude comments then frequently they are only relevant to the back and forth that produced the code and are exaggerated to the point of being misleading. A very common example is to land on something that isn't quite right or doesn't quite work, prompt an adjustment, and then the adjustment will have some grandiose prose about "preventing the critical bug that shipped once." People just need to clean up such litter manually but it would be nice if the models generated less of it.
- bryanlarsen 2mo agoThose massive comments generally refer to intermediate states that never shipped, making them utterly useless, noisy and confusing as a permanent artifact. They're sometimes useful to reviewers, so a commit message or pull request comment is much more appropriate.
- eloisant 2mo agoYes I hate when Claude explain in comments how it is now compared to how it was before, or how it could be if a different decision had been taken. Dude, just talk about the current state of the code!
- skeledrew 2mo ago> useless, noisy and confusing That's your perspective. For Claude that's an extension of its thinking, which makes it work better. Just like the person who takes notes so they have references for later. Take it away and you're negatively impacting outcomes.
- bryanlarsen 2mo agoNo, it's the other way around. If you put a comment "don't do foo" in your code, you're biasing future readers, human or artificial, to think about foo when you explicitly want them not to.
- skeledrew 2mo agoIt isn't about making readers not think about foo. It's about biasing thought about foo in a particular direction. And I've seen it work multiple times: agent mentions it encountered X comments in the code and revised its action as a result (yes, I read live agent transcripts).
- fpoling 2mo agoIf one needs to dig history, then git log -p and similar are way more useful and reflect the real history rather than LLM inference about it. Comments reflecting the goal are more useful as neither history nor code itself covers it.
- skeledrew 2mo agoLooking into git history is an active decision that's usually only done after something undesirable happens, and now there's the need to try and find why. Better to have the context passively loaded as part of working with the relevant section of the code, and likely prevent that something from even happening in the first place. Think Chesterton Fence.
- hamandcheese 2mo agoThe story of how the code got to a certain state belongs primarily in git commit messages, not in comments. Comments should serve to aid in understanding of the code, highlight footguns or hidden dependencies, etc. Claude very often litters code with comments about decisions that were made within a single session/pull request, its just noise.
- cageface 2mo agoThe new concise output style they just released definitely helps with Opus 5 in general.
- muglug 2mo agoClaude can add comments in code that are better just living as a comment on the PR. You'll ask it to do something and it'll comment the code with an answer to what you asked it, rather than just explanatory comments to whoever comes after. There's also a second issue that if the code is actually incorrect, the comment can nevertheless bolster the case for it.
- o-o- 2mo ago> Claude can add comments in code that are better just living as a comment on the PR. Not to Claude – its own, old comments have helped me/it solve new issues on more than one occasion.
- jedberg 2mo agoClaude assumes humans won't look at code anymore. The comments are for the next Claude that comes in to change something.
- iammrpayments 2mo agoThis is not true, the comments confuse claude itself and even eat context
- stabbles 2mo agoYeah, Claude insists on prompt-affirming comments, and often refers to the previous draft or implementation instead of the status quo.
- grim_io 2mo agoClaude comments often contain the whole iterative chain of decisions that led to the current state. Useful for the LLM to know the "why", but not something a human would do, unless it's a very critical and confusing part of the code.
- rebeccajae 2mo agoI found that Claude would litter the codebase with what felt like notes-to-self. Sometimes it would make an abstraction that wasn't very well thought out and when I pushed back on this choice, it would usually go with something more along the lines of what I suggested in my pushback, but left a comment like "use the git CLI instead of re-implementing git" or something. It felt like it was commenting on the diff sometimes instead of what the code was doing.
- mitjam 2mo agoYes, it feels like Claude is using code comments as a message board.
- CollinEMac 2mo agoFewer comments is generally a bad thing. Fewer AI-generated comments is generally a good thing.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- transdev12 2mo agoClaude comments look like this //add returns the sum of x and y //per section 2.1 of addition-implementation-plan.md sum is designed as the seam for user addition interfaces. //previously sum added numbers, now it adds numbers def add(x, y): return x + y
- netniuq 2mo agojust reading this comments made me despise the fact that I have to read this shit again tomorrow It's really time to move to OpenAI...
- transdev12 2mo agoI’m trying to pitch my boss on something like bedrock/foundry/vertex where we can just swap the model and still have it serverless over an api. Digital ocean particularly looks promising as well.
- ptrl600 2mo agoNot subtraction, not division.
- WASDx 2mo agoGood code is self-explanatory and don't need comments. I can really recommend the book Clean Code, here is a summary: https://gist.github.com/wojteklu/73c6914cc446146b8b533c0988cf8d29#comments-rules https://gist.github.com/wojteklu/73c6914cc446146b8b533c0988c...
- splap 2mo agoI find claude often comments about what the code *does not* do. Relevant at the moment, but doesn't belong in the codebase.
- ukuina 2mo agoWhich models? It is not useful to compare harnesses without this information.
- NyxWulf 2mo agoWhich models, and at what effort level?
- gls2ro 2mo agoAuthor of the article here. Yes, sorry for this. I think I rushed to post that and did not expected to be read by so many people. I used Codex TUI on MacOS using `gpt-5.6-sol xhigh` vs Claude Code TUI on MacOS using `opus-5 xhigh`. Of course it was a mixed work with subagents being Sonnet 5 in case of Claude Code and Terra 5.6 and Luna 5.6 in case of Codex.
- aleksiy123 2mo agoAgree with most of these. One thing I don’t love about codex/sol is I find it tends to overengineer and be overly cautious. I was using it to do create some scraping + data processing. It went kind of crazy on the provenance, need at least 3 sources of consensus before promoting facts type bullshit. defined a bunch of enums and gates. I just wanted scrape some site data and put it into a SQLite dB. Like chill codex. I feel like Claude is better at that.
- aksss 2mo agoWhat, you don't like it proposing sha256 checksums and state enums for everything?? :D It does seem to have this predilection, but I find it calms down if I tell it to simplify for "this phase". Sure, we'll pick that up down the road.. I promise. :D
- aleksiy123 2mo agoAs a follow up. I feel like codex/sol is better at well scoped hard technical problem. Where it can sort of run this brute force analytical loop. Like doing performance optimization or other search type problems. I think the math proofs are good examples of this.
- pixelmelt 2mo agoAgreed, only LLM I can give a folder of packet traces from a multiplayer game and wake up the next day with a server that feels identical.
- spudlyo 2mo agoI've noticed that too with Sol (xhigh) it starts with pretty good architectural goals, but really get lost in the weeds with certification and validation. Like it won't trust native tools like (in my case packer, Ansible, gcloud) to fail reliably under possible error conditions, and insists on implementing custom verification. It also doesn't have a clear idea of what the actual threat model is, and builds all kinds of extremely defensive systems to account for imagined hostile actors. I'm like "Dude, it's only our systems that are creating these SVGs, they're never going to be user supplied, so you don't need to write an entire validation and sanitation framework here." It also seems to treat the desired initial state of something as a permanent invariant and designs elaborate tests to ensure that it remains that way. Then when you make one little change it has to go and update a ton of tests it created. I've had to rip out a bunch of overengineered jank from several feature implementations, and in doing so I ended up having to create retrospective documents that warn against this kind of behavior that I'll have the model review whenever a plan begins to go sideways.
- corytheboyd 2mo agoI’m sure it depends on the type of work, but for mine, Codex is much more helpful. Honestly, it mostly comes down to it being significantly faster, probably because as many have said, it seems tuned to not spit out word vomit, both in its chat interactions, and its code (Claude is obsessed with massive comment blocks that are basically guaranteed to become dead context noise if you ever use it to iterate on code). I mostly do very obsessive, tightly scoped, carefully thought out small changes on a fairly boring stack, one interaction at a time, verifying functionality and code. I know what I am doing, but I also know what I don’t like doing (the same exact set of things I’ve already done a dozen times in my career)
- rullelito 2mo ago> Honestly I see what you did there
- 217 2mo agowhile everyone is somehow still stuck on and fascinated by claude, heres your quick update on the sota of coding models and harnesses mid august 2026 codex is good, both cli and desktop app, you get lots of usage on any plan. sol is good! and gets the job done, write or dictate a very long and thoughtful prompt, and leave sol xhigh or max fast working on it for an hour or so omp is an amazing harness, any feature claude code or codex is adding has likely already been here for a couple months. good harness which im suggesting to all my developer friends, but for everyone else codex is the better option due to its simplicity and being the plug and play option claude is decent, but not great. all models are somehow getting restrictive. you get basically unlimited opus on max plans, fable is good but slow and the random guardrails suck soo much which is why i havent used it once in weeks now. gemini 3.7 is great for speed. everyone is sleeping on it, including even me kimi k3 - great for frontend, one of the few models thats willing to commit crimes for you AND has the intelligence to have a chance at actually succeeding; ds pro and flash are fast but not something id actually use for important things, unlike sol, fable and maybe 3.7 here and there glm 5.3 i haven't tested yet honorable mention to local models which are actually getting good now! 5090s will continue to get more and more expensive in the coming months. sadly. theres way way more than claude in this world and its taking people surprisingly long to figure that out. maybe its for the best!
- xianshou 2mo agothe future is here and one should be thankful for its slightly uneven distribution. otherwise we would hardly have anything left about which to develop strong opinions!
- trjordan 2mo agoNot mentioning Grok 4.6 here is a crime. Fast and accurate. And it can communicate, unlike the gobbledygook that comes out of Claude.
- ceejayoz 2mo ago> Not mentioning Grok 4.6 here is a crime. Not yet. Don't give the guy ideas.
- mewse-hn 2mo agoI only have the $20 claude subscription. Last weekend I was doing a fairly heavy task (porting quake to raspberry pi native GLES 1.0) and ran out of claude usage twice, then hooked in with Luna in OpenCode and finished everything off for like $0.40 in tokens, which was impressive. With Opus 5.0 being kinda crappy vs 4.8, I think Anthropic is in trouble.
- smith7018 2mo agoOn the flip side, I've been using Fable to statically recompile a game binary from a system that's never been emulated to modern C++ while also keeping the code clean, maintainable, and portable and it's been a dream. I'm in awe of how fast Fable is able to bring a 20 year old game that's largely been lost to the sands of time to SDL3. It finished the recomp in about 3 hours. The next day has been fully rewriting the functions to remove old hardware-specific quirks and then rewriting large swaths into multiple classes, subsystems, building tests, etc. Tomorrow I'm going to add mod support and then experiment with a random platform like making a Switch build of the game. It's expensive but it's doing in hours what no one's done in 2 decades.
- schluss-s 2mo agoWhich one?
- smith7018 2mo agoiPod Classic click wheel games. Specifically Mini Golf. I've also been working on an emulator for the others and it can now boot all of the 20 decrypted games released ~20 years ago and play most of them. There's a Sims Bowling, Sims Pool, and Lost game in there which is cool from a preservation standpoint. Less cool are the SAT Prep 2008 games which have actually been surprisingly annoying to emulate due to the way the text uses blend modes. I plan on releasing all of this at one point. It's crazy it hasn't been done in 20 years!
- kromokromo 2mo agoModel performance is very much subjective to what you’re using it for. I’m a PM and doing mostly knowledge work, and I’ve been really happy with Opus 5 as my daily driver with very good results, perhaps my favorite anthropic model so far. I do a lot of front-end coding with it too. I prefer it over the openAI models, been switching frequently. Kimi K3 is great too.
- guywithahat 2mo agoI broadly agreed with the authors experience, although I wouldn't say codex does anything "wrong". I think different agents/LLM's have different personalities, and it takes learning to understand how to get them to do what you want. I had the same experience when we started using claude at work, and I was trained on codex. Claude seemed to do everything "wrong", because I was writing instructions designed for codex. I do agree claude looks for more things to do in your repo, whereas codex is more likely to do what its old and stop. Which is better is personal preference as far as I can tell.
- theaiedge 2mo ago[flagged]
- tunesmith 2mo agoFor me, codex $100 mo/plan and a claude teams account at work (mostly sonnet, some opus), Claude basically feels about as effective as Codex did 4-5 months ago pre-5.6. Claude still has weird patterns of being confident in one answer while another chat with the same model is confident in another answer, where one answer is clearly wrong. Missed details, over-engineering in places, while still overall helpful and effective. Codex, however, just feels freaking rock solid on Sol high. I literally have zero complaints.
- Kovah 2mo ago> It felt to me that Codex created a much simpler solution in terms of code architecture than Claude. Wow, I made exactly the opposite experience. Codex loves to make things as complicated as possible, even ignoring instructions and predefined skills. Claude behaves way more pragmatic. Maybe depends on the type of work one does, or even which programming languages/frameworks are used?
- smusamashah 2mo agoI have the same experience. I have passed Codex's code over to Claude (Sonnet mostly) to simplify it and it did a so much better job. Codex couldn't comprehend a simpler solution no matter what.
- mediaman 2mo agoOverall I prefer Codex over Claude in their current state, but I do agree that Codex's solutions tend to be too complex and I have to constantly tell it to simplify solutions, detect when it's creating ornate architecture, and proposing data models that have way too much going on. In my usage that's its main weakness.
- hinkley 2mo agoAnd every time you have to tell it to do it again, they get paid.
- mycall 2mo agoThis is a good idea. I'm making a complicated app and Codex is stuck at simplifying it, so I'll give Claude a go at it.
- Transformanshen 2mo ago[dead]
- enraged_camel 2mo ago>> I think the main difference I feel between Claude and Codex is that Claude tries to go above and beyond what is asked and guess what you might want and then directly do it, while Codex is more like a companion that does what you tell it but will not overdo it. It will stop at the first sign that it might be done. Damn, my experience is the complete opposite of this. I have posted about it a few times, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49348265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49348265 tl;dr I gave GPT 5.6 a small-medium sized ticket, which should have been several hundred lines plus tests. It ended up creating a 25,000+ line diff. Another GPT 5.6 Sol with fresh context looked at the worktree and said 98% of it should be thrown away. Claude thought the same, and suggested that several dozen compactions the model went through over several hours must have caused it to go adrift. I guess that's one consequence of having a relatively small context window. I still use Sol quite a bit. I find that it's consistently the opposite of what the author describes: it's too relentless. It doesn't know when to stop. Opus is the opposite: it'll give up a bit too easily. If everything goes well that's not an issue, but often times it'll say things like "task is done, btw I couldn't do X Y Z" and X Y Z will be some important verification step that failed because another agent was using that resource or something. At this point I trust GPT 5.6 mostly with surgical changes, or general codebase exploration tasks. It is a faster model, so it's easier to get small things done with it. For everything else I prefer Claude, despite its annoying tendencies.
- sejje 2mo agoI run sol on medium about 90% of the time. Maybe that's worth a try. Especially for a small change.
- efficax 2mo agoyou hear things like this about every model. they're probabilistic and you can't trust them, although i doubt that kind of odd behavior would happen on low or medium effort levels. i find all of the models today pretty good at following instructions generally speaking. i'm sure you did /plan, but i rarely see it stray very far from the plan. Then again, I never walk away, since i'm always spinning up another task that can be done in parallel, and I don't let things run overnight because I'm not made of token cash (yet)
- slopinthebag 2mo agoKinda interesting reading people comment with completely contradictory anecdotal experience with the various models.
- seamossfet 2mo agoI think a part of this is that people tend to undervalue their own skills and expertise when talking about these anecdotes. A lot of people in the comments do have a software engineering background. People at different skill levels in different backgrounds are going to be using these tools in different ways, and that's going to heavily impact their experiences with these models. Sure, there are differences between Fable and Sol. But I've even seen people on here saying that they're getting better mileage out of Qwen models they're self hosting. I think the driver is just as important than the car, when it comes to this sort of stuff.
- jatora 2mo agoI think this definitely applies to fable/opus/sol, mixed with the undeterministic nature of the models. But those claiming Qwen are just outright coping. Thats nonsense imo
- rossant 2mo agoI was about to say the same thing. I wish people gave some indication on the type of tasks they use the models with. Which kind of software, industry, programming languages, or even non-coding tasks. I suspect the experience might be vastly different from one type of task to another.
- stillpointlab 2mo ago> Codex feels more like a version of Data from Star Trek Great analogy for some reason. At fist I felt Codex Sol was a bit more cold. But now that I've worked with it for several weeks it has grown on me, even shown some personality. I appreciate that it is a bit more business-like, Fable is a bit too friendly sometimes when it ought to be focused on work. Codex can be a bit more nit-picky. I agree with most of his other observations. I've already started to bin tasks based on which model I feel is best suited. In general, for well scoped and straight ahead tasks where banging out code is what I want I reach for Codex. For less specced tasks where I need a broader view and want the model to fill in more details I reach for Fable. Both are great and they make a good team together.
- piazz 2mo agoSummer 2026 meta (well, mine): Sol is for routine work, Opus for frontend/design, and Fable for more complex / ambiguous / architecture work. Fable works extremely well to drive Sol as a subagent. Fable is the only one you can actually trust to not look at the code, but Sol is somehow still more pleasant to work with, especially in fast mode. Opus is the enemy, and it will make you insane if you talk to it for too long.
- moozilla 2mo ago> Fable works extremely well to drive Sol as a subagent. Curious what method you like for doing this? I've tried a few options and I haven't found one I'm happy with yet.
- piazz 2mo agoI'm using a slimmed down version of this skill: https://github.com/steipete/agent-scripts/blob/main/skills/codex-first/SKILL.md https://github.com/steipete/agent-scripts/blob/main/skills/c... The important bit I found is to explicitly remind Claude that Sol 5.6 is a very smart and good model; otherwise, Claude performs its normal condescension towards any non-Claude model behavior and insists on reading all the diffs in full and testing all of Sol's work, negating any token savings.
- AnodicElegy 2mo ago"How this article was written I wrote this article and used Grammarly to proofread and fix it." What a brave new world we're in, where this is necessary. Regardless, it's appreciated. Although, I have the feeling that those using an LLM to do most of their writing will be less likely to include such a disclaimer.
- pupppet 2mo agoI find Claude more often gets my intent without having to spell things out for it, while Codex gets hung up on minor details and over-engineers a solution for them.
- agentdev001 2mo agoIm trying to do my part in the world here. This post needs an edit. Author is not comparing "Codex" and "Claude". They are comparing Codex TUI/CLI with (presumably) gpt-5.6-sol, against Claude Code TUI/CLI with (presumably) Claude-Opus-5. Ctrl + f > [5.6, sol, sonnet, opus or fable] yields no results. "Claude" is a product family, which includes Models, and Harnesses (and probably more). "Claude code" covers both the Claude Code TUI, and CC in the Claude desktop app. "Codex" is the same, and could refer to the Codex TUI, or Codex in the ChatGPT (formerly codex) desktop app. (And well, historically, gpt-5.*-codex.) Hearing "Yea Claude is great for coding" takes an hour off my life. Something something "Honey why don't you finish up with your Nintendo and come to dinner?"
- asa123 2mo agoi was going to respond to you with a snarky holier-than-thou remark but then read the article and holy cow, nothing is specified at all… really feels like discussion spawns only off post title and as a second or third order effect, post content
- christophilus 2mo agoTo be fair, the discussions here are usually more informative than the articles.
- xboxnolifes 2mo agoHN article titles are really just promots for HN users to respond to.
- gls2ro 2mo agoAuthor of the article here. Yes, sorry for this. I think I rushed to post that and did not expected to be read by so many people. I used Codex TUI on MacOS using `gpt-5.6-sol xhigh` vs Claude Code TUI on MacOS using `opus-5 xhigh`. Of course it was a mixed work with subagents being Sonnet 5 in case of Claude Code and Terra 5.6 and Luna 5.6 in case of Codex.
- azuanrb 2mo agoI’ve been experimenting with this for a while, and right now I’m using Luna xhigh as my default. Previously I was using Sol medium. Sol medium is a great balance between speed and being thorough, but it’s quite expensive. Luna xhigh seems to compensate for slightly lower intelligence by thinking and reasoning for longer, so tasks can take more time to complete. But it’s crazy cheap. I also have some custom evals using promptfoo to make sure I’m not introducing regressions when switching models. So far, Luna xhigh has been really, really good for the price. Don’t sleep on it. Give Luna a try.
- cageface 2mo agoI’ve been getting good results from using Sol for planning and Luna for everything else. At current rates it barely scratches my weekly quota. Makes me wonder if the current Luna prices are sustainable.
- snvzz 2mo ago>Makes me wonder if the current Luna prices are sustainable. It likely is. Going by the performance of very competitive small models, Luna is likely pretty small (do they publish sizes?) to the point it might be runnable locally like Qwen 3.8 27B. The specialized hardware cloud runners have can likely run a small model very cheaply.
- ReptileMan 2mo agoClaude is pretentious abrasive snob, codex is the blue collar guy that gets shit done in my experience.
- miguel-muniz 2mo agoWhen discussing Claude vs. Codex, etc. I find it necessary to make the distinction between the models and the harness. Claude's models in my experience do a better job of inferring my intent, or to say it does a better job of giving me the result I imagined in my mind. A recent example was a UI prototype I was building for a desktop application. I had asked GPT's 5.6 Sol to update the open document in the prototype to better reflect the context of the feature I was designing, and 5.6 Sol took it very literally and had just added some text to the currently open document, not what I had in mind. I tried again with Claude Opus 5 and it added a completely new tab with a complete new document that, although imperfect, much better matched my expectations. You could say this was a prompting skill issue, but seeing how many people are prompting their AI I believe the labs are incentivized to continue to improve their ability to infer intent. When it comes to the desktop applications though, I find Claude Desktop's output to be incredibly verbose and full of jargon. I feel like it hits me with an entire essay and the UI doesn't have enough typographic hierarchy to make it easy to scan. ChatGPT Desktop is much better in this regard, I feel the output is concise, clear, and gives me just enough info to feel in the loop without being overwhelmed. Even though I have the setting on for technical language, it feels more understandable than Claude. I also feel that ChatGPT's desktop app has a better design and much more polish. I do not really like how bloated both applications have become though. This weird segmentation of Chat, Work, and Code all just seems like it's pushing a technical limitation onto the user. The other day I opened a document in ChatGPT and asked it to do something, then it told me it could only do it in work "mode", so it then created an entirely new conversation with a reference to the previous conversation. It wasn't a completely new area of the UI either, it just added a "Work" badge to the new conversation in the list. Feels a bit unnecessary, like couldn't you just keep it all within the same conversation?
- smallerfish 2mo agoI did the same this week. The speed is the first big contrast; I have a routine multi-step skill that I run several of per week. Opus 5 was routinely taking 2 hours to do it, while older Claude models took around 20 mins; Codex restored that speed. Second is legibility. Somebody wrote in one of the related discussions yesterday that Claude's current linguistic contortions could legitimately be considered damaging to mental health, which doesn't seem (too) hyperbolic to me. Codex (Sol) isn't perfect but it's much more direct. And so far I haven't seen it display much of an attitude, vs Opus's infuriating passive aggressive sulky know it all personality. I slightly prefer Anthropic to OpenAI as a company, but I will vote with my wallet and discontinue my max subscription unless Anthropic does some serious damage control within the next week or two.
- laichzeit0 2mo agoI don’t know what’s wrong with Opus 5. I’ve been using Code since November 2025 and Opus 5 is the first blatant regression I’ve seen. Like you said, it just goes off into an endless loop doing random busy-work type of stuff. That’s the best way I can describe it. It’s doing stuff, but it seems mostly like busy-work to me. I’m not saying the model is “dumb” it’s most certainly capable, its vision is better than 4.8 but however they post-trained it is a fuckup. Also whole heartedly agree with the Opus 5 output being incomprehensible. It’s written in a way that I’d call spaghetti-tech-English. You can unravel it but it’s painful. Fables explanations is effortless and smooth. Opus 5 is user hostile.
- bryanhogan 2mo agoI've been using Zed mostly with Codex session windows and its great. It is much easier to handle multiple sessions than in the Codex VSCode app and the interface is quite good.
- OpenWand 2mo agoI honestly would've used Claude more if not for the confusing presentation/font, I'm not an expert on this subject, Codex is just a lot easier on my eyes. Yes I have tried different settings already.
- dboreham 2mo agoAren't these CLI tools? How do they get to pick the font?
- ulofi 2mo ago[dead]
- prtmnth 2mo agoI cancelled my Claude subscription to give Codex a proper shot for a month. 1 week in, I'm more than happy. Sol is fast and capable. Luna as subagents for execution are very cheap usage wise (and API price wise too). I think more than anything else, I don't get a headache conversing with Sol. That alone is enough reason for me to stick to Codex. Experimenting with adding open source models to the mix to get more execution done while using Sol as the brain.
- futurist_hp 2mo ago[flagged]
- SipitenoMK 2mo agoguys, everything is about the harness, not the model! I even use Hy3 for free from nous portal, yes, it finishes the task in 50 minutes instead of 5, as Terra of codex would do, but I have it under the same harness (Hermes Agent) so result is more or less the same and it costed me nothing and worked at background while I was doing other things :)
- rpunkfu 2mo agoI believe that “it’s about the harness” captures an important idea, but I also think it’s helpful to consider the harness and the procedure separately. The harness provides the model with its tools, context, and environment for execution. However, I prefer not to have the model within that harness also bear the responsibility for remembering the process steps—like plan, implement, review, fix, and verify—deciding when to move from one to the next, and keeping track of the loop's state. For tasks that need to be repeated, I’ve been moving that part into a reliable, deterministic runtime. Inside it, Claude, Codex etc simply take on interchangeable roles. This setup makes changing models much simpler: the overall process remains consistent, and each role can be optimized independently. I’ve been developing this approach as ctx.traits, if you're interested, here are the docs: https://ctx.company/traits/docs/quickstart/example/ https://ctx.company/traits/docs/quickstart/example/
- nsoonhui 2mo agoI used both. Claude Code seems more generous with its quota, which is why I use it as my main driver. That said, Codex does seem more capable, terse, and faster. There are some tasks that Claude can't handle but Codex can. One example was a WinForms binding/project deserialization bug. Sorry, the code is a mess, so even I couldn't quite figure out which part was causing which problem. I initially thought the bug would be difficult to reproduce in a unit-test setting. Claude could only narrow down the problem and tell me where to put a breakpoint. Codex, on the other hand, actually managed to create a reproducible unit test first, and then used that to fix the bug. That impressed me. The only problem is the quota. Codex burns through it very, very quickly, even when I'm just using Terra 5.6 Medium. That's basically why Claude Code remains my main driver despite Codex seeming more capable.
- jeffreyrogers 2mo agoThat's surprising to me. I recently switched from Claude to Codex because I was blowing through my Claude limits. With Codex I haven't been able to use up all of my usage on the 20x plan, with Claude and fable I could do that in a day. Codex is also a lot faster than Claude. I do think Fable is slightly better and can come up with better abstractions than Codex but trying to read it's output became really frustrating to me.
- nsoonhui 2mo agoThis is strange, but you were using Codex Terra, or Sol?
- jeffreyrogers 2mo agoSol
- faitswulff 2mo ago> For Codex, working with Jira and Atlassian was a hassle in my environment... I hated this so much. Both acli, which my agents have to rediscover how to use from --help every time, and the MCP, which I have to reauthenticate against frequently. I have replaced both with a "skill" that just describes where to find an Atlassian API key and which version of the API to use. Works perfectly every time.
- fhub 2mo agoI just use both. One is doing review work the other is doing planning and coding. I pick which one does which arbitrarily. I have zero proof that the end result is better either way around. But I tend to have the reviewer on "high" and the coder on "medium" for whichever model my instinct thinks is best for the task. I think it is really hard to "prove" which one is better at this point as so much is dependent on AGENT.md/CLAUD.md, prior documentation/plans the code etc. If someone tells me one is better than the other I take it with a grain of salt. When dumb things happen I simply blame both of them - they are team afterall.
- felipeerias 2mo agoI use Claude Code with a MCP that lets it communicate with Codex and tell it to “iterate until both of you are happy”. The agents then go for several rounds criticising each other plans and implementations, catching big and small issues on each other’s work. The end result is not perfect, but it is a lot better than what I can get from relying on only one model.
- artdigital 2mo agoI do the same with Gemini. I have a skill that teaches any AI to use the antigravity cli (agy) to communicate with Gemini and ask to review or check decisions
- zatkin 2mo agoThere's some real research-backed evidence that this approach elevates output quality, and it was even discussed a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47169627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47169627
- smartbit 2mo agoAnthropic confirmed it in their recent report https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49316271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49316271 > We expect that agents coordinating in the wild will act in higher variance ways than we see here, because they’ll have different backgrounds and therefore different contexts. They also, presumably, won’t all be Claudes.
- johnyzee 2mo agoI do use a second Claude (both Opus) to review the first one's output - it almost always finds worthwhile (often critical) observations. They have different 'perspectives', one wants the job done, one wants to find problems, is how I had it explained. Claude chat itself called it 'Claude-on-Claude action', which I found cute.
- piotraleksander 2mo ago
- deadcatfound 2mo ago[dead]
- leovander 2mo agoReading through the comments, people should self reflect on their workflows whether it be prompting or agent workflows and double check if they really need to be using Opus or the latest and greatest model from their favorite provide of choice.
- millicentricism 2mo agoMy main issue with Codex and many other harnesses is the permission flow. For just about every other harness it’s either alert fatigue answering permission asks all the time, or spending too long time hoping that you know the tools well enough to scope out a permissions file that actually works. Then there’s the “yolo in a VM” approach which also is a time eater and overkill. Until someone solves “auto mode” with the other harnesses, I’m with Claude.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 2mo agoCodex has an "auto mode" that I would say is better scoped as you can configure the policy of the auto classier. Probably allow by default except... if you had fatigue with permissions file. Its not an out of the box feature unlike Claude Code. .codex/config.toml --- approval_policy = "on-request" approvals_reviewer = "auto_review" [auto_review] policy = """ Your prompt to the permission classifier here, e.g., Allow requests by default except requests involving... Obtain user approval for denied request. """
- Razengan 2mo agoMy last experience with Claude: https://i.imgur.com/jYawPDY.png https://i.imgur.com/jYawPDY.png I paid for Claude for only 2 months, each several months apart. Including a week of trying both Codex & Claude side by side on the same tasks with the same prompts. I had been subscribed to ChatGPT/Codex at $20 for over a year and now I'm on my second $100 month. The whole experience is just so much better.
- joddystreet 2mo agoI have completely moved away from Claude to Codex. OpenAI models are better at following instructions and skill use. Claude generates more code, tries to build things that are not planned or needed, repeats same mistakes over and over. Chatgpt on the other hand just does enough, within a project would not repeat the same mistakes, tries to guess your workflow, so you don’t have to ask it to run the same. If you need more control over your code/projects, if you know what you want to get done, use Codex. If you have no idea what you’re doing and are happy to let LLM drive the thing, use Claude. Codex/Chagpt is for the competent.
- mindwok 2mo agoI think the conclusion is a little too strong but mostly agree, Codex feels like a chisel and Claude feels like a wrecking ball.
- joddystreet 2mo agoYour words are definitely a better way to put it
- joddystreet 2mo agoOne more observation - Claude is better at delegation than Codex. Chatgpt is a better planner. Have a discussion in Chatgpt, have Claude to plan work chunks and have GLM to deliver, Codex to review and fix, delivers an overall a better version. Problem - It’s just too much of a context switching. Solution - I am thinking about a new product, a collaborative workspace where I can run this workflow.
- aabdi 2mo agolol i do this too, but i just use my own orchestrator. recommend building one yourself, think its better that way. there's quite a few on github,
- dbbk 2mo ago"tries to build things that are not planned or needed" I literally never experience this when using plan mode upfront
- yoz-y 2mo agoI use Claude, codex and antigravity pretty much interchangeably. For iOS I used Gemini 3.7 flash to build almost everything with good success, but had to reach for Opus to fix a rather tricky audio engine problem (missing function annotation moved audio to the main actor). Reached for codex after google banned accessing Gemini from OVH servers for some reason. I’m sure there are edge cases but for your daily vibe coding or “make my printer work with the Tailscale instance running here” business I think they’re all fine.
- KronisLV 2mo agoOhh this comes in a really good time! I mean personally I'd just like to use OpenCode with all the providers, if their desktop app was a bit more polished and Anthropic wasn't so restrictive. There's also Paseo, but it has some issues with OpenCode sub-agent liveness checks (I've seen them hang, though the same happened with Kepler, might be a GLM 5.3 issue idk). > It felt to me that Codex created a much simpler solution in terms of code architecture than Claude. This feels odd, cause I've seen people say the exact opposite thing, that the GPT 5.x models seem to love overengineering etc. > The output of the Codex agent harness is much more “technical” than the one from Claude. Claude feels more like your colleague in a Tuple session writing to you while Codex feels more like a version of Data from Star Trek. This is very much preferable to me omg, maybe I should give OpenAI a look again.
- bob1029 2mo agoI'm still using gpt-5.5 in copilot (visual studio proper) as a "custom" model. It feels like I've been enjoying an ~unpatched exploit while everyone else wallows in the proverbial mud. A large part of what pushes developers toward these products appears to be the billing model. Pre-paying for tokens is some kind of ideological red line for a lot of developers. I think this is a strategic error. The subscription models have so many more perverse incentives baked in. Those paying $100/m+ for subscription access are almost certainly getting taken for a ride based upon my experience with prepaid tokens.
- dsign 2mo ago> The subscription models have so many more perverse incentives baked in Yes. But, as your "so many more" implies, there are also perverse incentives in pay-per-token. And now, for the first time, the companies with the perverse incentives also happen to own the intelligence needed to, ad-nauseam, evade market and customer oversight. Potentially, this is a war where one side can inflict a thousand paper cuts in one second and the humans are on the other side. I think this is going to be an interesting test, a taste if you will, of what AGI means.
- lelanthran 2mo ago> Those paying $100/m+ for subscription access are almost certainly getting taken for a ride based upon my experience with prepaid tokens. I don't understand what this means. Are they overpaying and getting less? Typically "taken for a ride" means, exactly "The seller got more out of the deal than usual sellers would". Buying a burger for $3000 == "taken for a ride". Paying $30 for all you can eat != "taken for a ride".
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- KronisLV 2mo ago> Pre-paying for tokens is some kind of ideological red line for a lot of developers. If I can get a few subscriptions for 100 - 200 EUR month and NOT have to pay 3000 - 9000 EUR (based on ccusage and some other stats) in tokens then it’s a no brainer for me to do that. I don’t get why paying per token would be better if it’s economically disadvantageous.
- bbtalk 2mo ago[dead]
- synthrakx 2mo ago[dead]
- skerit 2mo ago> A week of using Codex more than Claude Which Claude is this about? Sonnet, Opus, Fable? All totally different beasts.
- gls2ro 2mo agoAuthor of the article here. Yes, sorry for this. I think I rushed to post that and did not expected to be read by so many people. I used Codex TUI on MacOS using `gpt-5.6-sol xhigh` vs Claude Code TUI on MacOS using `opus-5 xhigh`. Of course it was a mixed work with subagents being Sonnet 5 in case of Claude Code and Terra 5.6 and Luna 5.6 in case of Codex.
- mendidou 2mo ago[flagged]
- dbbk 2mo agoI find myself in an awkward tug of war between Claude and Codex. Claude is the buggiest product, always breaking in bizarre and aggravating ways. Codex is much more polished, especially on mobile. However the main thing that's prevented me from adopting Codex full time is its poor implementation of plan mode. While Claude persists it to disk and re-reads it in full on compaction, Codex's just lives in context, so it basically immediately gets destroyed when compacted - which happens a lot, given Codex doesn't default to 1M context window.
- tnchr 2mo agoI ask it just to make a plan file
- theshrike79 2mo agoIt's a pain in the ass if you're doing parallel planning on the same repo. It's much easier when the harness itself "knows" about planning and does it properly without me holding its hand.
- dbbk 2mo agoThat won't do any of the things plan mode enforces
- freepiai 2mo agoAre you using the desktop verion? The CLi is very robust, but these days it just feels crazy slow to me.
- maestroquirk 2mo ago[flagged]
- mehranmm 2mo ago[dead]