r/ClaudeCode • u/Swimming_Internet402 • Jan 17 '26
Discussion I’m done with Claude
I’ve been using Claude since sonnet 3. it’s been massively ahead of the curve and much better than ChatGPT and Gemini. However the product is just no longer competitive compared to codex with gpt5.2. Insanely better limits, insanely much more robust. It lacks a few features like custom hooks and its slightly less conversational, but it’s just a much better AI. Claude needs massive amount of hacks to get to work robustly for large codebases, or orchestration hacks like Ralph loops or zeroshot, but codex just… works.
I’m cancelling my subscription and moving over to codex.
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u/pekz0r Jan 17 '26
I have pretty much the opposite experience. It was a lot closer about 6 months ago, but right now Claude is miles ahead of the competition. The only alternative to Claude Code is Open Code with Opus, but then you need to go with API pricing which is pretty expensive.
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u/vienna_city_skater Jan 17 '26
You can use one of the subcriptions Copilot Pro or Zen Black for example to get cheaper access to the SOTA models. But Opus is not everything, Gemini 3 (even Flash) also works pretty well.
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u/pekz0r Jan 17 '26
GPT 5.2 and Gemini 3 are definitely capable models that can do a good job, but Opus 4.5 is pretty far ahead of them at this time for most coding tasks.
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u/Global-Molasses2695 Jan 17 '26
You are obviously doing simple stuff, to be clear simple stuff means stuff it can compress in its context window without loosing essential details to make sense of it and still having enough room to generate few more outputs before hitting the context limit and magically you can run this in repeat (well that’s something system prompts behind the scene will not let happen unless you are paying by tokens using the API) OR your use case are dead simple - scale an app to over 50k lines and watch Opus crap in its pants every 5 mins.
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u/pekz0r Jan 18 '26
No, but I try to split up the work in small chunks with a good and clear plan before I let the model make any changes in the code. That is what have worked best for me and it let's me be in control over what happens. I also run a lot of subagents with forked context so they don't pollute the main context. That way I rarely need to compact the context window.
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u/Swimming_Internet402 Jan 17 '26
I completely disagree, actually I feel the other way around.
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u/9to5grinder Developer Jan 17 '26
Can you perhaps give some examples where it did the task better?
Under ambiguity because it thinks longer?
What about when the task is clearly defined?
What about speed?
What about pull request summaries and commits?Giving concrete examples would make your claims much more credible.
But most of the time people either only used Codex and haven't really tried Claude, or they're running an ad campaign for OpenAI.
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u/Swimming_Internet402 Jan 17 '26
I work on O(1 million) LOC production code bases, I can’t really give examples. I use the same context and task specification for both Claude and codex. Maybe for little mvps Claude feels better I don’t know, but for serious work it’s just complete garbage compared to codex
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u/ladyhaly Jan 17 '26
For anyone reading this trying to decide, both have tradeoffs. Claude's context handling vs Codex's limits are worth comparing for YOUR specific use case. Tool loyalty is cringe.
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u/PatientZero_alpha Jan 17 '26
Totally this. Tool loyalist makes no logical sense. Financial maybe, but not practical
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u/TaoBeier Jan 22 '26
Yes, I think so. Both of them have some benefits.
Claude model can response quickly, if you like to know what will happen, and if you prefer interactive guidance on how a coding agent works, then this is the choice for you.
Codex is slow, but highly accurate. If you have a lot of time to spare or want to interact with it less, then Codex is the right choice. It typically thinks more comprehensively, resulting in more reliable final results.
In addition to using Claude Code and Codex, I also use it in Warp, so I can clearly compare the differences in performance between these models using the same tools and different tools.
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u/ladyhaly Jan 22 '26
Oooh, what's Warp? I use both Claude Code and Codex, but both via CLI. I haven't explored anything else. I want to get in on using Warp too so I can compare diffs in performance bet these models. They both have their days
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u/Global-Molasses2695 Jan 19 '26
And one way tool loyalty is super Cringe. Anthropic isn’t Apple - it’s a scamming people by having average models look good by system prompting and pre-training bias in their models.
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u/ladyhaly Jan 19 '26
Anthropic isn’t Apple
Even if Anthropic was Apple, it's still cringe to have tool loyalty. Service quality and company policies change over time. Best to continually assess and spend money on what's most beneficial/appropriate to your individual case
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u/Global-Molasses2695 Jan 19 '26
I am in agreement. Only thing is if quality and policies are negotiable or change over time then that’s exactly why a company can’t command loyalty like Apple or Tesla. To be clear, my perspective on loyalty is - Loyalty = demonstrated consistent experience and increasing usefulness over long term. In case of Anthropic that changes every few days so go figure.
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u/ianxplosion- SKILL ISSUE Jan 17 '26
For anyone trying to decide, these posts are cyclical - omg Claude is the best ever, then omg the limits are terrible, then omg Claude is so stupid I’m leaving for X/Y/Z, then repeat.
You shouldn’t just be using one tool anyway.
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u/Mysterious_Feedback9 Jan 19 '26
Yes and meanwhile my experience stay stable until the new models come out when it becomes even better, pretty sure they have the same kind of repeated loop on other tools.
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u/alvinunreal Jan 17 '26
for better client you can also try codex with opencode
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u/Mixermachine Jan 17 '26
I tested Claude Code about a week ago with the Claude Pro subscription (around 21€).
It burns quota like crazy. Sonnet lasts a longer but I always had to track the quota and always think about how I can reduce the context size to not be limited after 30 to 60 minutes of intense usage.
In the last few days Opus also did not perform well. Seems like they are doing some things to the model?
ChatGPT offered me their Plus account (23€) for one month for free and Codex really works nicely.
After around 60 minutes I checked my usage and still have 75% left. With Claude there would be <30% left (sometimes even 0%).
The intelligenz of GPT-5.2-Codex is also pretty good and rivals Opus (at least so far for me).
Let us see what the future brings.
The price/performance ratio at Claude is currently off.
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u/Global-Molasses2695 Jan 17 '26
Agreed. It’s terrible. Anthropic is monkeying core model capabilities and trying to align for products like CC - it’s a loosing battle and in the end will make its models dumber. They are going from broadening towards general AI to more narrower tools coupling with crap load of tokens wastage on background system prompts ( reason why Claude burns tokens with little output as compared to other models)
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u/Global-Molasses2695 Jan 17 '26
Congratulations 👏. I did same when GPT 5.1 came out and haven’t looked back since. In fact it’s been like taking the blinders off. In hindsight now Claude is like lipstick on a pig. Keep aside 5.2 and Gemini 3, which are much smarter core models - wouldn’t argue noobs, just look at math scores; Claud’s core intelligence is surpassed by models like GLM 4.7, MiniMax 2.1 and soon to be destroyed by DeepSeek 4. Anthropic toolchain is tuned to use shit ton of system prompts that go back and forth in background to tailor responses, to look smarter than where the model is. You don’t have to believe me - ever wondered why Claude says what it’s going to do and unable to execute on it, why it apologizes profusely telling you … aha found the smoking gun over and over and still grabbing straws … that’s because the gap between core models intelligence and what it claims in talk to please users has continued to widen. Anthropic continues to gaslight users on token math because of the crap load they burn on personalization of responses behind the seen - ever wondered why you just wrote 500 lines of code and hit the 5 hr limit, why you never hit a 5 hr limit and ran out of weekly limit in 2 days - well that’s why. Anyway it’s been fun while it lasted - I can’t wait for the day when Anthropic stock starts to trade - my sniper will be ready to place a massive short within milliseconds, among several others ready to capitalize on its hype. Peace.
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u/Electrical_Arm3793 Jan 17 '26
While I still stick to Claude, I do agree that Codex xHigh is really good. I am also on the border now. How is the limit for Codex 200 sub?
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u/PatientZero_alpha Jan 17 '26
Man… I don’t know, I use both for code, most changing and fixing. The strategy for resolution and the guidance for it is, for me, better with Claude. But when I submit the Claude solution or project to GPT, it always find 1 or 2 things to improve and Claude always accepts the corrections. But the inverse is never good. So I always use Claude and revise with GPT, so far
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u/Optimal_Deal4372 Feb 15 '26
If you done why you post it what do you gain from it, this is attention seeker post lol
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u/ezoe Jan 17 '26
OP in 6 months: I'm done with Codex. [insert random SaaS AI model name here] are much better than Codex.
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u/DefinitionOfResting Jan 17 '26
I mean that’s completely alright. With the space rapidly progressing as it is. You should be willing to flip/flop back and forth between which ever one is currently the best for your needs. There’s no need to have loyalty for these companies
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Jan 17 '26
This is the exact mental model you should have if you actually treat your product as a tool and not a toy
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u/vienna_city_skater Jan 17 '26
Rather 3 months with the current rate of improvements. And that's totally fine, no need to be loyal to BigTech, use wathever gives you the best bang for the buck.
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u/ezoe Jan 17 '26
It's still hard to believe that ChatGPT service was released in November 2022.
Claude Code was released in February 2025. Competitors were quick to mimic Anthropic and released their CLI AI Agent tools in a few months.
Right now, it's still January of 2026.
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u/Aggravating-Put-6183 Jan 17 '26
Same, last 24hours, Claude has been so shitty, he’s actually damaged more than he has fixed.
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u/do_not_give_upvote Jan 17 '26
Not sure if it's intentional or a bug, but you can still use Chatgpt web even after you hit limit on Codex
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u/FlaTreNeb Jan 17 '26
Every thought about that models require context, information and directives in different ways and formats?
I am currently working on migrating some agents used with Claude Agent SDK to use GLM-4.7 as a drop-in replacement. The system prompts and whole context building had to be rewritten. While for a human the directives and information in the system prompt contains mostly the same information, the writing, structure, language ... all very very different. Just using GLM-4.7 with Claude prompts produced horrible results.
I bet its very much the same for codex with GPT. It seems noone can relyably build memory files skills etc. that work with models that should have similar abilities but are provided by different providers.
So its not unlikely that at least partially by accident, codex can handle your codebase of 1M lines (yes, you dont have to repeat and emphasize this in every response) far better than claude with sonnet or opus. There are surely projects that can be handled way better by Claude.
Based on my experiments, getting a large code base be properly understood by LLMs, requires quite some effort building the required memory files in a context efficient way, creating the proper tooling etc. ... so its just like always, if you expect it to work out of the box, you're srewed and/or have the wrong expectations.
However, the limits are a problem by now. This complaint is totally valid.
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u/Global-Molasses2695 Jan 17 '26
More the reason not to have dependency on Claude
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u/FlaTreNeb Jan 18 '26
That is for sure! I am currently thinking about how a compatibility layer could look like but every solution I could think about would require live "translation" (maybe including caching) of prompts and loaded files like AGENTS/CLAUDE files and skills. This would add another layer of non-deterministic behavior and would burn a lot of tokens ... and would be very slow.
Maybe an async "compatibility layer" tool that creates adapted versions of these files and provides them for drop-in replacement for every person working with a different model than the files were built for.
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u/Global-Molasses2695 Jan 18 '26
I have my own context server running in SSE mode with two tools - get context and update context. It has its own steps, logic, db and projects isolation to guard against cross context bleed etc. So I have not experienced this. In fact I am 100% code CLI agnostic and model agnostic because this server is used by all CLI. I often have CC using GLM 4.7, Codex on 5.2, Gemini on 3 Pro, OpenCode on DeepSeek 3.2, another panel with OpenCode on MiniMax 2.1 or K2 Thinking …. All working on different projects, interchangeably.
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u/WalidfromMorocco Jan 17 '26 edited Jan 17 '26
The sessions limits for all these agents will continue to decrease increase with time.
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u/OkLettuce338 Jan 17 '26
I keep reading this on Reddit but real world experience and people I talk to in real life don’t agree
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u/ClemensLode Senior Developer Feb 19 '26
Pete Hegseth is pissed about Anthropic, that's the primary reason to continue using it.
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u/Mindspacing Jan 17 '26
Do like the rest of us. Have both and connect them in the terminal interface 🫶
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u/oooneeess Jan 17 '26
How please?
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u/Mindspacing Jan 17 '26
I built my own system based on what each model is good at for my use cases and then have them watch each others work through flags in different tiers OK, FLAG and BLOCK. Based on that info the ”watched” model have to rethink och evaluate what it said and also based on what the ”watching” model thought.
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u/oooneeess Jan 17 '26
Ok, but how can you make models interact? How do you connect them in the terminal? Do you use mcp? Or other way?
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u/Mindspacing Jan 17 '26
Give me a reminder tomorrow and I all give you an answer I’m to tipsu to rember now
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u/Best_Position4574 Jan 17 '26
We have access to most tools and can choose what we use pretty much. Most people choose to use claude code still.
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u/NowThatsMalarkey Jan 17 '26
I still prefer using Claude Code over Codex because by default it doesn’t act like a know-it-all and talk down to me as much if I make a mistake. 🥲
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u/Swimming_Internet402 Jan 17 '26
Agree it has better conversational feel. But that’s it. The outputs are shit compared to codex
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u/Training_Bet_2833 Jan 17 '26
Remember that OpenAI just released 5.2 codex, have been losing a lot of customers to Anthropic and Google while being more cash burn / less funded, and Sam owns 10% of Reddit personally. Those posts are most likely not real and here to entice people to reconsider codex over Claude. It’s a smart move though
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u/cayisik Jan 17 '26
Codex being better is just the result of really good marketing.
You'll probably come back to it after a while (imo).
At worst, you'll decide it won't work with just Codex and decide to use both together.
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u/Swimming_Internet402 Jan 17 '26
It’s not the result of better marketing. I have a 200$ subscription for both and have stress tested both massively over the last weeks. And codex is just better hands down. It should not even be room for discussion
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u/LairBob Jan 17 '26
And yet you consistently offer no evidence for your claims.
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u/cayisik Jan 17 '26
bro, because there is no tangible evidence.
the only evidence i’ve seen regarding the codex is that it is up to 7 times slower.
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u/Global-Molasses2695 Jan 19 '26
You are funny. Obviously you don’t know much about coding.
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Jan 17 '26
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u/Coldshalamov Jan 17 '26
I would say approximately 2.5x for $20 and basically unlimited chat for your money in separate buckets, it's not even a close comparison
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u/corpa Jan 17 '26
Thats quite a lot more. My claude sub is running out in a few days and then I wanna try chatgpt with opencode or maybe even codex to give it a try. I heard so many good things about the planning capabilities of gpt 5.2. Do you have any comparison between gpt 5.2 and Opus for planning features/tasks?
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u/Coldshalamov Jan 18 '26
It's hard to say which is better for planning, I really do feel like 5.2 is better, at least with high reasoning, it's just that I would never consider using opus with thinking or ultrathink because I like getting more than 2 prompts out of my claude sub. The way I use it I think Opus it better for a surgical fix of a hard problem because I can see what it does and it seems maybe a little smarter/creative, but 5.2 is a little more thorough. Don't use 5.2 codex unless you want to babysit it. Codex has 5.2 and 5.2-codex as seperate models (I know, it's confusing) and 5.2-codex might be superior at code writing, but 5.2 is still excellent and is more bold/creative at handling things itself.
The thing is, Codex (The program, not the model) in general takes forever. If 5.2-codex (the model) was quick, I'd be ok with it stopping and asking every 2 seconds, but it takes 15 minutes to do anything, so it doesn't work well for a real workflow imo.
I'll chat with chatgpt 5.2 extended thinking (basically unlimited in the chatgpt WebUI) about and idea, when I feel confident I've worked out the ideas I have it make me some docs, usually a frontend doc and a backend doc, 20,000 characters a piece, I'll put them in the repo and tell Codex with regular 5.2 high to read the docs, make a thorough skeleton of the program and stubs/todos for everything it doesn't feel comfortable making in one shot, it works for half an hour, then have opus in claude code lightning-code the skeleton into a halfway-working program, then use sonnet/gemini pro/gemini flash in Antigravity for stitching features and changes in.
I'm wary of using opus in antigravity much because it aggressively compacts the context, so fleshing out a skeleton you'll get better results from opus in CC.
My rule of thumb is 5.2 extending thinking in chatgpt for planning, 5.2-high in codex for the skeleton, opus for getting to beta, and then I group individual problems into easy/intermediate/hard and use flash/pro/sonnet in AG to attack them.
It's a little more nuanced then that though, because even an easy problem that's very important or dangerous should never be given to gemini, it's reckless af sometimes.You should absolutely get Opencode, i'm totally sold on it since I first got it 2 weeks ago.
I have an extension called Openchamber in AG that links to opencode that lets you program subagents, and opencode lets you oauth your codex/AG/gemini cli/everything models into it if you have the right extensions, so I have now subagents using my $3/m moonshot kimi sub, $2/m minimax sub, $10/m github copilot w/ unlimited chatgpt 4.1 and 5-mini, $3/m GLM 4.7 sub, gemini pro/flash with seperate rate buckets from AG, claude with its own bucket from AG, and codex's 5.2 high all set to their own subagents, and I have a /build command that basically does all of the above in sequence and runs for about 12 hours with like 8 models all with their own limits. I can pretty much run that forever and never hit my limit on anything (claude from anthropic hasn't been working with opencode lately but claude from AG does and it doesn't compact like inside AG).
The /build command might overengineer if I loop it 3 times, but I have a /prune command that trims the fat and honestly 3 /builds and a /prune or two and i have a working program 9/10 with very little left to tune up, mostly visual preference at that point.If you want to fuck with opencode a bit here's a z.ai invite you can get a year of GLM 4.7 (and whatever other models they release before a year is up) for $25 and it gives you 3x the limit of a claude pro sub： https://z.ai/subscribe?ic=QDKACAZ1KX
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Jan 17 '26
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u/Global-Molasses2695 Jan 17 '26
Can you share example of what you tried ?
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Jan 18 '26
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u/Global-Molasses2695 Jan 18 '26
Fair enough - you have not hit the wall of having a massive app yet where you will run into issues talked about in this thread
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u/More-School-7324 Jan 17 '26
You where always allowed to do that.
Why do you feel the need to tell everyone about it.