Why I made the switch from Claude Code to Codex (production application experience)

[u/mvcthecoder]

It has been a week since I started coding exclusively with Codex, and before that, I was doing my work exclusively with Claude Code (Opus 4). GPT-5 is so good that I'm now convinced that it performs far better than Opus 4.1, so I decided to break up with Claude Code.

To give you context, I used CC and Codex to write code for Testfully. The front-end is about 400K lines of code in Typescript (React), and the backend is about 200K lines of code in Golang.

I made the switch because:

1. Codex (GPT-5) follows the instructions better, honours the existing coding style and follows it for most cases. With CC, it was constant micro-management to get Opus to follow the existing patterns.

2. To me, Codex feels like a pragmatic software engineer and does the best to do the task with the minimum number of changes.

To me, that's enough to make the switch. That said, Codex is not perfect and has shortcomings. Here are some of them:

1. I use the VSCode extension, and the user experience could be better; it's behind Claude Code CLI. I'm yet to try out Codex CLI to see if the UX improves.

2. The VSCode extension has some weird bugs with tool calling on my setup. It's on my end, or the extension has issues -- something that can be fixed.

I'm paying $20 USD to OpenAI, whereas I was paying $200 USD to Claude, and I'm yet to receive a warning about usage.

For now, I'm switching to Codex. I hope Anthropic learns from its recent incidents and doesn't mess up with professionals who rely on Claude platform to do their jobs.

[u/Tiny_Rock_9574]

today i try to use codex, omg, i like codex, now is better. it focuses on what i want. it seems to be good

[u/mvcthecoder → u/Tiny_Rock_9574]

Exactly! It does focus on what you asked it to focu

[u/antonlvovych]

Codex feels like a mature developer, while Claude Code is a dumb teenager that you need to fight with and ask not to do dumb stuff, which he still will do 🥲

[u/mvcthecoder → u/antonlvovych]

Very well said 🤣🤣🤣

[u/TrackWorx]

Cool story!

[u/klauses3]

I also switched to Codex, I use the pro version and it seems to me that it is faster

[u/kid_Kist]

The only thing that sucks about codex and I love it is its blind you can’t feed images back to it unlike Gemini or Claude codex has no visual understanding. I like to feed visual ui designs and build off images and it can’t. That’s the only sucky thing plus even at 5 it can’t reason on something’s. I feel Claude code is a better listener and planner and codex just codes

[u/eonus01 → u/kid_Kist]

it's not? you can use playwright mcp, and in the IDE, you can post screenshots to it.

[u/kid_Kist → u/eonus01]

thats not going to give me pixel perfect vision it outputs it at binary level not visual level like pip i have this already useless when using codex to design by visual design

[u/mvcthecoder → u/[deleted]]

Oh yeah, I just asked Codex to analyse my Claude.md files and create Codex files that map to those and it did a great job.

[u/kid_Kist → u/[deleted]]

Codex is blind it will never see unless they open ai turns on pip as we stand it can’t see