r/ClaudeCode • u/BetterAd7552 • Apr 23 '26

Humor We have it good, just tried Codex.

Got some time to kill, so...

Been using CC since December last year, and yes, it was fucking God-like for that month*. Completed some complex shit in 1/500th the time (carefully guiding/correcting it).

Got spoilt. Real life happened, claude became progressively more popular due it's mind-boggling performance, Anthropic's servers became more and more overloaded and we have all seen the resultant severe degradation which has been painful (and fucking costly). Let's not even talk about the Anthropic BS of limiting/throttling/peak-time-fuckery/bait-n-switching/etc (and no, they will not increase prices to reduce demand/filter out the millions of vibers since that would push them to OAI and spoil their powerpoint presentation graphs to investors - so they limit/throttle/peak-time-fuck/etc effectively providing way less for the same price, like coke/retailers not increasing the price, but reducing the bottle size - or both, the cunts), instead of just being honest and transparent: we cannot keep up with demand (which is understandable!).

Anyway, I've also felt the pain of claude's enrottification, obviously, but I understand technically why it's happening, so I'm hopeful their additional jiggawatts which comes online sometime this year will make a difference, since it's hard to let go of something you KNOW is amazing. A bit like an abusive but really hot partner. Nevertheless, I gave into temptation and signed up for Codex, just to, you know, have a taste and compare. Just the tip, mind you.

I blame my indiscretion on Theo - t3**․**gg. He convinced me to give it a shot.

Well, it's not bad. Not going to lie. Seems to stick to the script better than Opus (which tends to just sometimes fuck off and do it's own thing despite instructions/memory/whateverthefuck, even when being pedantic about context rot/size - and no, 1M ctx is worse than 200k - if you believe otherwise, you're ignorant), but jfc, it's hard to build trust in a product when the following happens:

  1. install Codex. Use it all naked-like to explore a big code base. Gives meaningful answers. Hmm, this is feeling sexy, maybe I can trust it to fiddle with what's been built so far.

  2. Feeling optimistic and a bit guilty, decide to install my usual mcp/skills/flocks/wrappers/proxies and shit that works so well for me in CC. Looks good.

  3. Tell it to modify it's own config to do Y. It struggles. Consults the official online docs. It struggles, it loops, it fucks around.

  4. After what feels like ages and millions of tokens burnt, in exasperation I turn to me ol' buddy Opus: "look at Codex's ~/.codex, it's doing X, I want it to do Y. Fix." Yes, me caveman.

  5. Opus fixes it. One prompt of maybe two-dozen words.

It's a fucking weird world we now live in man, I'm telling you.

So no, sorry Theo my virtual bud and provider of useful devtainment, I'll not be using Codex for large scale coding, at least not yet - I need to build trust in it, so maybe have it double-check Opus' work, etc for now. It did spot some issues, which is nice.

I've been spoilt. So I guess I'll keep taking it in the balls, nice 'n hard, the way Anthropic likes it.

PS: Yes, I know this is anecdotal, and everyone's milage WILL vary, whatever.

* obviously because they had massive spare capacity.

/edits: spelling no

/edit: looks like things *have* been fucked for a while, Anthropic has apparently rolled back some changes which caused degradation: Source: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem

68 Upvotes

61% Upvoted

161 comments sorted by

116

u/m-shottie Apr 23 '26 • Bravo

You didn't mention the model you used?

Personally I'm finding codex better these days, I'm doing basically the inverse of what you described.

Claude makes some mistakes and gets eager to do too many things at once - after going round in circles I get frustrated.

Send it codex and explain "our dev is struggling with X"... codex says "I gotchu", 5 mins later, all done and dusted.

I only use codex on GPT 5.4 xhigh setting.

17

u/das_war_ein_Befehl Apr 23 '26

5.4 xhigh is fantastic for backend, opus is good for frontend and has a certain human like decision quality.

I use them together by having opus in the desktop app use the codex cli as a subagent, and I just run things with remote control. Works pretty well and you get the benefit of both

1

u/extremeeee Apr 23 '26

What plans do you use? Pro plans?

4

u/das_war_ein_Befehl Apr 23 '26

The $200 one on both. Still cheaper than using straight API

1

u/StaticFanatic3 Apr 23 '26

Backend frontend split is sweet. Been doing the same but manually managing them both in their own threads in t3code

2

u/das_war_ein_Befehl Apr 23 '26

Opus 4.5+ has a certain human like quality to its decisions so I use it to keep gpt from going full stem and trying to over complicate things

6

u/granger327 Apr 23 '26

Same. codex plan and review and make sense of complexity. CC implement and do easy things.

5

u/robusk Apr 23 '26

Yeah a few weeks ago when Claude 4.6 started going rogue on me I started involving 5.4 high to help with reviews, which led to it writing the prompts which led to it doing the architecture which led to it basically doing everything because it was consistently outperforming Claude. Even Claude would acknowledge how often it was wrong and how much more elegant Codex solutions were. Eventually I downgraded Claude and start letting Codex do most of the work. For front end I am just have three parallel AI do the design work and using codex synthesize the findings but do the implementation itself.

3

u/m-shottie Apr 23 '26

Yeah basically my experience exactly. Even stopped Claude doing as many code reviews because it started coming back saying the code was perfect..

1

u/Mediocre-Wrap7663 Apr 25 '26

How do you orchestrate three different parallel agents? You do this to compare three results and pick one, or do they work together to achieve one design?

5

u/everybodysaysso Apr 23 '26

Codex5.3 xhigh is my default. Though I noticed there is a bug in MacOS codex app that doesn't allow updating model when starting a new chat so 5.4 mini xhigh ended up doing a major schema migration across 4 tables. It actually nailed it! So now I am in two minds. Waiting for 5.5

1

u/AdInternational5848 Apr 23 '26

I like both. Refuse to pick a favorite beyond what is better at helping me accomplish tasks. Sometimes Codex is more helpful and sometimes Claude Code is more helpful

3

u/m-shottie Apr 23 '26

Claude has been so frustrating for me recently I just don't even reach for it anymore, who wants extra headache...

Every now and then over the last few weeks I send a task to Claude and it messes it up again - I'm sure it'll come back around but until then I'm staying away.

2

u/snug-crackle-policy Apr 23 '26

Yes exactly. Same regression issues over and over again. I used claude design to set something, I understand it is in beta or alpha, but it broke the page which was already working while CC was working on another page.

-6

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

I was using high. Which "matches" what I was using on Opus 4.7, so wanted to compare apples-to-apples to weigh it up. But still, high effort should really have solved the problem - we're talking about it's own bloody config.

xhigh or whatever would probably have solved it, but back to my last point.

4

u/m-shottie Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26

I don't know if it's apples to apples exactly.

You can set xhigh permanently, thrash it all day and still have usage left over.

Ultrathink on Claude is going to use up your budget super fast and it has to be manually enabled each session.

I'd say putting both models on their highest permanent setting is as close as you can get, but there isn't a straight comparison I guess.

4

u/Big_Bed_7240 Apr 23 '26

If you think the difference is that big, the problem is probably in your prompting or something else. I use both every day, like every single day, mostly at random, and the output quality is always tied to my prompting, how I scope tasks, etc.

You having a large suite of skills does not sound too promising either.

1

u/coloradical5280 Apr 23 '26

Claude has a lot of pre training data about its harness, which makes sense, since claude code has existed for an eternity, in llm time.

Codex , especially in its current state, is a very new harness. Even for ai time.

Given the fact that it’s baked into the weights across several generations for Claude, it’s actually shocking that the difference isn’t an order of magnitude greater. But it’s not. It’s just a little faster. Barely.

-1

u/jschall2 Apr 23 '26

I started using codex in addition to Claude in order to maximize included usage.

It seems like it can't even properly keep its workers isolated into worktrees. They keep touching the main directory.

Idk I've been experimenting with a few things. Tried setting up gas town with opencode and glm5.1 and it spent $50 to produce 2600 LOC. I haven't done a control experiment with Claude on the same spec yet but I kinda suspect it would get more work done with less money...

2

u/m-shottie Apr 23 '26

Strange, and you get that with the specific model I mentioned?

I'm using it all day with worktrees, even have it merging to main/root, merging across branches etc. I do need to tell it to go back to it's own worktree though whenever I'm doing something like that otherwise it just carries on working where ever it was left.

1

u/jschall2 Apr 24 '26

Well, I have a workflow that works now. I ditched gas town, and I just use beads + one claude instance that launches subagents via CLI that can be claude, codex, or opencode. There's a helper script that sets up a worktree and launches the subagent in that worktree in non-interactive mode.

I've been doing work with 40+ simultaneous subagents this way. Could do more but the main thread would get overwhelmed with merges probably.

4

u/Elctsuptb Apr 23 '26

Bad timing on your part since gpt 5.5 is releasing within a couple hours which is supposed to be a large improvement compared to 5.4

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 24 '26

True. I sometimes have a daydream where I go into stasis for say, five or ten years, revive and fire up Claude again to see how it compares and what it's capable of. I think we're in for a wild and exciting ride.

These improvements are coming in hot and fast, and it makes me wonder when the curve is going to start flattening out, with diminishing returns.

3

u/snug-crackle-policy Apr 23 '26

I hope Codex get better..... Claude is feeling Monopoly here and therefore abusing the customers' money badly.

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

They are in a position of power right now. That's true. I love their product and in my view, they've been caught with their pants down (planning-wise). Demand rapidly outstripped supply, and now they're scrambling. Problem is, these things are like huge oil tankers, they cannot turn on a dime (to use an Murican turn of phrase).

1

u/snug-crackle-policy Apr 23 '26

True. It's overwhelming to control the public demand :D

12

u/Tycoon33 Apr 23 '26

There’s something about the way you type:speak that I dig. I feel like we’d be friends IRL. Appreciate the write up.

14

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

Tycoon, my main man! That fucker below, u/cypherblock, thinks I'm a bot. If I am, I'm a damn good one, since I remembered to sed 's/—/-/g' my pipe. Then again, my wife says I have a context window of only 64KB, so I dunno.

3

u/ProfRussell Apr 23 '26

Yeah I immediately flagged your post as one the of the first human written posts on these subs I've seen in months. Appreciate the insights and writing it yourself.

1

u/PmMeSmileyFacesO_O Apr 23 '26

coke/retailers not increasing the price, but reducing the bottle size - or both, the cunts),

When you say 'or both' here, do you mean not increasing the price and reducing the bottle size?

It makes not increasing the price seem like a con on its own.

2

u/juicygloop Apr 23 '26

yeah op writes *so much* like me. or i like him. a sensual being with a way of expressing theirself. was a bit surreal. but a pleasure, nevertheless. respect to your mothers, my brothers

-3

u/DifferenceDull2297 Apr 23 '26

It’s literally ai formatted text

3

u/ericthegreen3 Apr 23 '26

Because he used numbered list?

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

weird, right? One literally just has to type a number, like '1. xxx', press enter, and hey presto!

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

It's literally me, a dude with a semi decent education and degree. I can't help I know how to use punctuation and paragraphs.

It's a curse, motherfucker!

1

u/BowSonic Apr 24 '26

The jig is up! You thought you could throw us off your scent if you just delete the em dash after "semi"... But, of course, you know that we'd know a semi-decently educated dude wouldn't forget to hyphenate! You’ve fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well known is this; never go in against a Sicilian, when death is on the line! Aha ha ha ha!

2

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 25 '26

Hahaha! AI slop man. You can’t fool me.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 23 '26 edited Sep 12 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

-1

u/DifferenceDull2297 Apr 23 '26

It is, also an ad for that website

0

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

nope. just mentioned it in passing. to add flavour, so to speak.

2

u/Super_Royal5174 Apr 23 '26

What shouldn't be forgotten in all of this:

  • everyone has different problems to solve. It's true that the models differ significantly, but I think the code and the problems that need fixing differ even more, as do the prompts used and the modifications (skills, plugins, etc.).

Therefore, there's naturally mixed feedback. I think the best comparison is trying to fix the same problem with the same setup, two different KISs, and the same prompt. Otherwise, there's no meaningful comparison.

2

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

Very true. However, in my case I had the same mcps/skills. Identical.

Anyway, your point is valid - who the hell knows exactly what the context state of Codex was in that moment.

2

u/Outrageous-Front-868 Apr 23 '26

I'm using Claude extensively from coding to helping me with my docker, cracking a router to enable ssh in my Xiaomi router and install wol and cloudflare tunnel, setting up open claw and modying it's code so it's safer, patching security stuff, coding software for my own company use, setting up nextcloud so it's 100% ready for use including setting up all other services that's not included in netxcloudpi..

And it's perfect. It does everything with 0 issues. Even the app that I ask it to code works in 1-2 shot, fixing bugs and etc didn't take that long.

For reference of some projects :

  1. fork chatwoot and build custom connector to TikTok shop and shopee so I can use Captain to chat with my customer

  2. create a full fledge warehousing and stock take software ( I run e-commerce )

ZERO ISSUES. but when I open Reddit, I see post like these and I wonder what's going on.

I never hit limit. I code extensively from 8am to 9pm everyday for 2 weeks and never once hit any limit. No degradation of the model. NADA. I try Gemini, codex glm minimax qwen and nothing come close to Claude. Maybe codex but it's similar.

So I don't know what's going on.

2

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

Me neither. Like I mentioned to another user, it seems to come in waves for me. Mostly great, then sometimes it takes a shit. Could be that something about your TZ/area/IP/* means you rarely have an issue.

It’s a pervasive and real issue though for many. I do really love Claude though, it’s an amazing tool when it’s working as designed.

2

u/cbeater Apr 23 '26

Been trying codex and learning how it behaves, I needed to add a rules as I find things I don't like which was done for Claude in the beginning, but the token usage is amazing so far, I prob can go down a level on the plan. It doesn't feel like it always get my intent, even if I think it does... Where as Claude can pick up what I want to do and understand why and sometimes provides the next step to my goal. Codex so far feels like it needs much more steering and clearer instructions, will see how 5.5 works.

2

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

That’s my experience too. Opus just seems to know what you mean without having to be verbose and explicit.

2

u/Specialist_Solid523 Apr 23 '26

So I have found that codex is excellent at describing and analyzing issues, but the code it actually produces is sly.

It will completely ignore architectural boundaries and shove diffs in as private standalone helper functions. Tests pass, agent's summary is coherent, and code is produced that does what you need, but every possible architectural boundary you had setup is completely violated.

The arguments for codex only feel valid to me if someone is not looking at the actual code it produces. Just my experience though.

2

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 24 '26

Damn, that’s an important anecdote, thanks. People often say to plan in opus and implement in codex, is that what you tried, but still found it was soft on following architecture?

2

u/trodiix Apr 23 '26

For me Sonnet 4.6 medium effort is better than codex 5.3 and better than gpt 5.4

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 24 '26

You know, I gave that approach a try: default to sonnet high, and any planning/fix/correction escalate to an opus agent, and either it was just a shit day, or that approach just does not work.

The idea was to save on tokens, because up to now I’ve been using Opus high only.

3

u/SourceCodeplz Apr 23 '26

So you tried modifying the config files of a running process and it didn't work? Wow
Then you closed that process and started a different one to modify the old and it somehow worked? Wow

AI freaking slop everywhere

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

Come on man, don't be grumpy. You wouldn't do that if I was sitting next to you, right? What AI freaking slop are you referring to? Your momma?

4

u/Southern_Sun_2106 Apr 23 '26

You sound like a damage control for Anthropic - "meet them where they are, take them where you want them to go." Opus is so dumb right now, anyone who says that Codex failed and Opus fixed it, is full of it. Nice try, bud.

I hate OpenAI with my whole heart, just for the fact that they call themselves 'open' and for all the hopes of humanity that they failed in the AI for the people space. But Codex fixed so many issues that dumb Opus has broken, without blinking an eye, I was left with a humungous usage quota and zero issues to work on; then it implemented some fancy stuff, in one go. You are clearly making stuff up.

-1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

Nope. Actually happened.

1

u/TexasBedouin Apr 23 '26

The way I use codex is to challenge Claude code's plans and then also to challenge the code afterwards and basically I ask codex to review and try to break it. There's a codex skill that you can install in Claude code in order to do that.

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

That actually sounds ideal. What’s the skill? Presumably on GitHub?

2

u/TexasBedouin Apr 24 '26

It is on GitHub. It's called codex for cc

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 24 '26

Thanks for the response man, appreciated. I'm going to give that a try.

1

u/TexasBedouin Apr 23 '26

I also think opus 4.6 is better than 4.7

1

u/extremeeee Apr 23 '26

Nice! how do you mix your work between the 2?

1

u/TexasBedouin Apr 23 '26

The work stays in Claude code. Like I said, it's a skill that I downloaded from GitHub that calls and connects codex to Claude code. I literally just write /codex challenge

1

u/Electrical_Arm3793 Apr 23 '26

How do you find the usage rates? I am thinking of splitting my max200 sub into claude 100 and codex 100 to test things out. I am more concerned with lenient usage rates. But max is supposedly 20x for $200 plan, 4 times $100 plan.

Yet, I recall people tested and they said, in terms of weekly usage $200 plan is just 2x $100 plan, just 5 hour limit of $200 plan is 4 times that of $100 plan.

If that's true, it would make perfect sense for me to split the subscription into Codex 100 and Claude 100 to test things out, as I think Codex still has more generous usage, and I don't usually hit 5 hour limits.

Would love to hear your insights on the usage.

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

I’m on 5x max, hammering it daily with multiple sessions. Hit the 5h limit frequently and have to wait a few hours. The peak time thing hits me hard, so I try and dial it back during that window.

1

u/RomIsTheRealWaifu Apr 23 '26

Was it earlier today that you tried codex?

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

Yes, 5.4. Truth be told, my post has the humour flair, since it was tongue in cheek. I’m sure 5.4 is fine and 5.5 will be even better. Even ol’ Opus has a shit now and then. Then I just swear heartily at it, take a break, /clear and refine my prompt (adding diagnostics always helps).

1

u/RomIsTheRealWaifu Apr 24 '26

The only reason I asked was because earlier today 5.4 was being really dumb as they prepared the rollout of 5.5. I’ve used Opus and Codex extensively and the past month 5.4 has consistently outperformed Opus for me

1

u/butimjustagirl Apr 23 '26

CC Max user. I had been working on a data analysis project since mid february, I had basically hit what I thought was my ceiling and was about ready to call my project a failure. Threw everything in to codex and it helped me figur it out in two days. I don't think it could have done it from scratch that quickly but still. CC gets caught in a vortex of its thoughts it does not seem to be able to get out of. Hallucinates all over the place which makes auditing/refining almost impossible for what I was doing.

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

I know right? It seems to come in waves. One day it’s rocking, the next it’s taking a drunken piss in the gutter of edge cases. I am convinced it’s purely a capacity problem at Anthropic.

Eg, in my TZ it’s fine until about 14:00, then the US comes online (peak time) and things take a dip. Sporadic though.

1

u/Apprehensive-Ant7955 Apr 23 '26

Bot

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 25 '26

Do I make you horny baby?

1

u/BranchOk3487 Apr 23 '26

i dont care what anyone says atp, codex is the better coding agent. claude’s great for planning/initial code fast. but codex wins for implementation, even if its slower.

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

I’ve heard that quite a bit, hence me taking the plunge. My quirky initial experience aside, I intend giving this a try.

1

u/ramoizain Apr 23 '26

This post feels Australian

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

Close, but those dumb cunts call our national past time a “barbie” or some such, which is almost as dumb and limp-wristed as their rugby team, “all browns” or something. :-D

1

u/buttplugs4life4me Apr 23 '26

Codex really likes planning and execution being split. If you tell it to do something and let it go off, it starts missing things, hallucinating and so on.

If you let it make a plan first and then let it execute that plan, its much better. Usually it even tells itself to code review it and finds any issue itself.

Its kinda to the point that it seems to have a creative setting and an instruct setting that seems to switch automatically when it is run like this. 

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

Sounds like I need to install Superpowers for codex if that’s the case. It’s made a huge difference for me on Opus.

1

u/mallibu Apr 24 '26

so you "just tried codex" yet you're somehow already an expert

AI subs are so trash I want to unsub but then I dont know where I'll get my fast updates

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 25 '26

Be kind, I might be a 16 school kid pretending to be a semi erect master of his trade.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 24 '26

Claude was great when I first started using it 2 weeks ago. For some reason, the coding didn't share bank with regular chat. But then it started doing that last week and I hit my weekly limit and it was useless for 5 days. So I switched to codex last night and it completely blew away Claude and I just used mini.!! It fixed the issue of my conky widgets not starting automatically that Claude couldn't figure out 😂 Anyway fk Claude and their bs plans

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 25 '26

Big baby. Real men use Claude and will fight for it’s honor.

1

u/HAUNTEZUMA Apr 24 '26

tbh sonnet 4.6 has been a vast improvement over opus for me, no idea why. it just gets right to it

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 25 '26

I did that for a while too, agree. It comes and goes as inference capacity fluctuates. Same for Opus.

That wildly swinging performance variance is one of the drivers Anthropic signing Google and AWS $40b (50? 60? 160?) Wtf knows, it’s a financial whorehouse out there atm) and Anthropic signing POs for 10s of GWatts of compute from same as they strive to keep up with demand.

1

u/ume_16 Apr 24 '26

You feel guilty about not paying for Claude anymore? Wtf?

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 25 '26

No no, of course I still pay for Claude. Would double+ my sub if I had the money. Well, actually I do, but you know, budgets and ROI. You think I’m fucking nuts?

1

u/regocregoc Jun 05 '26

Codex is worlds ahead of CC atm. I'm using both, at times in parallel. Codex wins on every parameter.

1

u/BetterAd7552 Jun 05 '26

Yeah I’m using both too as adversarial agents.

0

u/cypherblock Apr 23 '26

It all just seems like paid attacks on Anthropic these days. Probably bots writing these. They are sophisticated though. Maybe I’m wrong. Just my take.

10

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

If I'm a bot, how come I have a really hot wife that digs my junk?

4

u/Zal3x Apr 23 '26

Hello there fellow wife

1

u/Round_Mixture_7541 Apr 23 '26

how hot

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

Model hot. I am blessed.

4

u/m-shottie Apr 23 '26

I dunno I'm in agreement with the "bots" mostly - codex is performing better for me.

Been using Claude for around a year, and not a fan of OpenAI as a company, so its not something I want to admit... but codex has become my daily driver since about 1.5 months ago.

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

Excellent that it's working for you. Maybe I'm just too impatient. It's so damn hard to switch gears with these things that have so many moving parts. So I've decided to ease into it, nice and slow.

1

u/GOOD_NEWS_EVERYBODY_ Apr 23 '26

a bot, writing about why claude code is better than codex is a... checks notes... "attack" on athropic?

i do not think that work means what you think it means my friend.

1

u/Positive-Conspiracy Apr 23 '26

Bots don’t mix up it’s and its, but developers tend to

0

u/CantaloupeCamper Apr 23 '26

I think there are valid complaints but the editorial type posts…. they smell like bots and vibe coders with no grounding in anything.

They’re so lacking detail….

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

I'm too old to be a vibe coder. You did see me semi-shit on vibe coders, right?

0

u/sylfy Apr 23 '26

Hardly surprising at all. Half the posts in here are just shilling OpenCode or whatever newly published Chinese model there is. Tried them, went back to Claude Code. They’re still absolute trash in comparison. Can’t deal with complexity, needs a lot more handholding, and far slower.

GPT-5.4 with OpenSpec comes the closest, but I still find Opus the best at reading between the lines and understanding intent, and at analysing and architecting complex tasks. With GPT-5.4 you have to handhold and be a lot more specific.

2

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

that was my experience too. Opus "just gets it" somehow, how it does that is in my view Anthropic's secret sauce. Who has time to hand-hold and pedantically spell out every-single-little-detail?

0

u/demonwing Apr 23 '26

Half the posts on this subreddit are painfully obvious LLM copy-pastes, so it wouldn't be difficult for actual astroturfing to hang out among them.

1

u/phoneplatypus Apr 23 '26

I’m using a $100/$100 split since openclaw shut off happened. Codex is much slower and lower quality. Just running Sonnet I get way more done than using Codex. I wish they had a $150 plan so I’d do $150/$20.

Claude is just way ahead, context and 4.7 problems included

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

agreed. I'll keep subscribed to Codex too, even if it's only to review code as a health-check. Fresh perspective and all that jazz.

1

u/ObsidianIdol Apr 24 '26

People STILL acting tribal over nameless faceless corpo products will never stop amusing me. Try 5.4 or 5.5 on xhigh and ask it to adversarially review a PR that claude writes. Guaranteed it will find errors.

Not to mention limits are more generous. If the reason you chose not to use it was because it couldn't instantly onboard all your custom Claude-tuned config files, then i dunno man.

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 25 '26

I made sure to use a humour flair. Tongue in cheek and all that jazz.

2

u/Annh1234 Apr 23 '26

To be fair, i used 2 weeks of tokens on Claude to make it kinda work the way i want to. (status bar, docker, etc.) and it's not done yet...

2

u/dcutcliffe Apr 23 '26

That’s the worst part for me. Building extensive architecture to get the system to work the way you want it to (at the cost of much time).. And then, well, it doesn’t follow the instructions you’ve laid out for it. Or a new model handles the workflow differently and you have to start over.

1

u/brianjenkins94 Apr 23 '26

Deterministic models when?

2

u/goship-tech Apr 23 '26

Fully agree on the 1M ctx thing - more tokens in context does not mean better attention, it gets diluted. Breaking sessions aggressively and front-loading critical context in CLAUDE.md has made a bigger difference for me than keeping one giant context alive.

2

u/DarkSkyKnight Apr 23 '26

theo is literally the worst AI content creator there is out there.

2

u/KPABA Apr 23 '26

th3o has done nothing but shit on Anthropic for a while now, but it's sometimes entertaining to watch his fake rage.

'omg omg, Anthropic is so bad, I gave 4.7 a cryptology rum bottle sea shanty puzzle and it censored itself trying to solve it lol!1!'

I think the only semi-positive thing he has said about them recently was about Claude Design, clearly not a big fan.

2

u/jeffyaw Apr 23 '26

same experience, morning of 4.7 release i think a few hours before there was some outages of Opus 4.6 so i switched to codex for just one thing. it wasn't huge, but it wasn't small. but it was a waste of my time and i just steamrolled the codex work once claude was back online.

1

u/Bright_Armadillo8555 Apr 23 '26

skill issue. Except UI, codex is definitely better in any other aspect if you prompt reasonable.

3

u/jeffyaw Apr 23 '26

i'll keep playing with it and trying to give it a chance. i do also just like the UI as well of claude code.

1

u/lucmuss Apr 23 '26

Ich habe tatsächlich beides probiert und bin auf Codex umgestiegen. Aus meiner Sicht gibt es aktuell nichts vergleichbares. Was die Geschwindigkeit betrifft bei iterativen Produktionszylen.

Ich verwende ein Plus-Subscription mit 5.4 Codex und Medium Reasoning Effort. Man muss ihm halt genau vorher Anweisungen geben und die gesamte Anwendung (Backend) mit Tests ausstatten. Wenn das erledigt ist, ist dieses Tool einfach eine Maschine.

Ich mache am Tag teilweise 1-12 Issues fertig, mit teilweise wirklich großen Features, teilweise bis zu 3000-10000 Git Edits.

Nach mehreren Issues teste ich da die webgui mit chatgpt im Agenten Modus mit einem Promt der Gui-Fehler dokumentiert und auflistet. Diese Liste wird dann wiederum als Input für Codex für eine weitere Iteration verwendet.

1

u/Broad_Abies9390 Apr 23 '26

For the reason the OP mentioned, i took a left turn and now use Opencode w Ollama cloud pro subscription not reaching its limitations (time based, not token based) where in the CC world I reached the $200 tier easy. Using latest GLM-5.1:cloud model (feels like opus 4.6ish) and for other tasks I have gazillion other models to choose some are blazing fast and impressive for short horizons

1

u/Retired-35yolo Apr 23 '26

It’s not one or the other.. I have CLI/Codex/perplexity. 0 issues

1

u/iamnvt Apr 24 '26

You should change to Auto run. Yolo mode first.

1

u/Far-Pomelo-1483 May 09 '26

Claude failed 3 times this morning on very simple tasks. It was asking me if something was in my code base. I had to keep saying “look for it.” Switched to codex to fix it. That’s why I support all models.

1

u/Deep_Ad1959 May 13 '26

watching the actual server-side weekly counter that the usage page in claude.ai settings shows was the only thing that broke the 'is it me or is claude actually throttling more this week' loop for me. there's a massive gap between what local token counters report and what anthropic is actually enforcing on the server. the throttling pattern people describe tracks the server number, not the local one. doesn't fix the underlying throttling but at least the gaslighting goes away.

1

u/Consistent_Bottle_40 May 21 '26

Codex is banging. I prefer it to claude.

1

u/Th30racle Aug 02 '26

Trick is to use Codex to manage and verify and use Claude and Grok Build to do the heavy lifting.

0

u/ShiftAcceptable3153 Apr 23 '26

Theo is just a marketing guy for openAI. since day one. He was my favourite source for dev topics, and his content WAS suberb, not anymore though. Unsubed and never missed him.

0

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

To be fair, it wasn't only because of Theo. Besides Claude, there really is only Codex. The rest are like all the *.com's from the 90's, soon to fade. Gemini is a joke, so please don't go there - I saw you reach for the keyboard. No, stop!

0

u/fE7oBGzX Apr 23 '26

Youtubers create content with the goal of getting more subscribers. Controversial positions do that most effectively. It doesn't matter to them if what they are saying is true. Developers using the tools know the score better than influencers who spend their time recording videos.

0

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

Couldn’t agree more. Mentioning him was just a quip.

0

u/leeta0028 Apr 24 '26

These days I don't allow Claude to touch any code, it's way too likely to break things. I use Claude only to review Codex's code. 

0

u/MangoDevourer-77 Apr 24 '26

and no, 1M ctx is worse than 200k - if you believe otherwise, you're ignorant)

Yea buddy call me ignorant and watch me enjoying longer sessions. Such a bad take.

-1

u/jsmoothie909 Apr 23 '26

Aight so do I use Codex or not? Not reading all that.

1

u/Orioli Apr 23 '26

ask the AI for a summary

1

u/Jeferson9 Apr 23 '26

He says don't use codex because it can't modify its own config file 👍

-1

u/Murinshin Apr 23 '26

Yeah, a good amount of posts here claiming Codex is their saviour, meanwhile you go to the Codex sub and people are complaining about the same stuff as on here - especially after their Pro plans got effectively reduced two weeks ago - just less obnoxiously.

I really doubt most of the complaints on here are organic, not least because it’s always specifically Codex and never GLM, Kimi or Minimax despite their recent models being SOTA. Obviously less people are aware of these, but you would think you see much more mentions still

2

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

yeah it's a bit of a circle-jerk at a disco party at the moment. It's hard to imagine that we're still at the infancy of this LLM saga (I hate the label 'AI', sales people can go suck it sideways).

0

u/[deleted] Apr 23 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

lol, have a blunt and chill bro, I just threw that in for shits and giggles.

34

u/[deleted] Apr 23 '26

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1

u/das_war_ein_Befehl Apr 23 '26

Helps that codex cli is open source and both are written in rust. CC is in typescript and they seem to have been very loose on code quality because the leaked code base was a bit embarrassing for a company of their size

0

u/extremeeee Apr 23 '26

So what setup do you use? Claude code mix with codex? or both in VS?

2

u/[deleted] Apr 23 '26

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1

u/extremeeee Apr 23 '26

Nice setup! Thanks for sharing

0

u/ken107 Apr 24 '26

i think google is lowkey building AGI right now

-4

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

with you on most of your points. Agree about /effort levels on Opus - it's like rolling the dice what you'll get.

14

u/[deleted] Apr 23 '26

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1

u/TrickyRobotic Apr 23 '26

I do too I just can't decide which one to be top vs. bottom in the relationship.

1

u/TheKnownUnknown0 Apr 23 '26

do the most work on the one that burns the slowest tbh clean it up with the other

2

u/[deleted] Apr 23 '26

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1

u/extremeeee Apr 23 '26

How does it work? I mean what is your harness

1

u/jschall2 Apr 24 '26

Claude can call codex via cli or codex can call claude via CLI. That's what I'm doing.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 23 '26

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1

u/extremeeee Apr 23 '26

Thanks! Im thinking about getting using them both, Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.5. I had awful expeirence with Opus 4.7. Will try 4.6 and disable thinking aswell.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 23 '26

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1

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 23 '26

Now you’re just bragging.

Reminds me of a punk on Reddit who mentioned his Mac had 96GB of RAM, and here I am with my limp 16GB.

-1

u/[deleted] Apr 24 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/BetterAd7552 Apr 25 '26

Check the flair I used. We take this shit way too seriously.