In my experience gpt5-codex (medium) and codex-cli is notably better than Sonnet 4.5 and claude-code. (note: never tried Opus)
It is slower, but the results are much more often correct and it doesn't rush into half-baked solutions/dumb approaches as eagerly.
I'd much rather wait 5 minutes than have to clean up manually or try to coax a model into doing things differently.
I also wouldn't be surprised if the slowness was partially due to OpenAI being quite resource constrained. They are repeatedly complaining about not having sufficient compute.
Bigger picture: I think all the AI coding environments are incredibly immature. There are many improvements to be unlocked.
Seems like HN is slowly split between “ai sucks” and everyone else who is slowly discovering what it can do, while Twitter is leagues ahead using other tools to build stuff.
If you want to compare Codex and Claude Code side by side you can do it in Crystal in worktrees from one prompt https://github.com/stravu/crystal
Ah bots analyzing bots. Seems openai has a larger bot army than Anthropic rn
I really like codex… but without the ability to launch sub-agents, it kinda struggles with context.
The biggest thing I use agents for is getting good search with less context.
Codex just struggles when the model needs to search too much because of this. Codex also struggles with too much context: there have been a number of times when it has just ran up on the context limit and couldn’t compact, so you just loose everything since your last message, which has been a lot of lost context/work for me.
I like each at different times in different ways. Now I have both running in separate Tmux panes and have one talk to the other to ask/delegate/verify/validate, using my Tmux-cli tool (now a Claude skill of course):
https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools
Now my work on a project often spans multiple sessions of these agents. So I use a session-finder and resume/dump tool (also in that repo). I often ask Claude or codex to extract all useful details from a jsonl session log file so I can continue the work.
For a good month I juggled between Claude Code and Codex CLI and found that Codex CLI did the job better. I recently ditched Claude Code and am currently only using Codex CLI.
Its interesting to me that Codex has such high sentiment. I'm definitely an outlier on the more principled end of the spectrum, but I refuse to use OpenAI products.
I take issue with the AI industry in general and the hand-wavy approach to risk, but OpenAI really is on another level in my book. While I don't trust the industry's approach to AI development, with OpenAI I don't trust the leaderships' intentions.
for me I don't understand codex the same way I don't understand gemini.
In my day to day tasks the only models that actually do what I want are the antrophic ones all other ones just fall flat on their face most of the time and end up creating more work than antrophic models.
I wonder if it's because I tend to abuse my models and constantly tell them that they're stupid
I'm still using cursor and it seems fine. What does CC and Codex offer that's so much better than Cursor. Idgi
Regular codex user. Its my typing assistant. Allows me to be the ideas guy when writing software. Codex makes plenty of mistakes when generating large blocks of code but its easier to cleanup and consolidate with a refactoring pass once the typing had been done.
It looks like you have not reviewed r/ClaudeAI. This is a much larger subreddit and most of the posts are about Claude Code. Many comparisons of CC vs Codex.
comparing vibe coding tools based on vibes — makes sense!
Is Aider done for?
Reading the comments and posts about both Claude Code and Codex on Reddit (and often hacker news), it’s hard to imagine they’re not extremely astroturfed.
There seems to be constant stream of not terribly interesting or unique “my Claude code/codex success story” blog posts that mange to solicit so many upvotes.
Sucks-Rules-o-Meter, but 2025.
Notice how pricing is the top discussion theme. People love free shit and it's hard to deny codex usage limits are more generous. My 2c for someone who uses both tools pretty consistently in an enterprise context:
- Codex-medium is better if you have a well articulated plan you "merely" need to execute on, need help finding a bug, have some specific complex piece of logic you need to tweak, truly need a ton of long range context to reason about an issue. It's great and usage limits are very generous!
- Sonnet 4.5 is better for everything else. That means for me: non-coding CLI ops, git ops, writing code with it as a pair programmer, OOD tasks, big new chunks of functionality that are highly conceptual, architectural discussion, etc. I generally approve every edit and often interrupt it. The fast iteration and feedback is key.
I probably use CC 80% of the time with Codex the other 20%. My company pays for CC and I don't even look at the cost. Most of my coworkers use CC over Codex. We do find the Codex PR reviewer to be the best of any tool out there.
Codex gets a lot of play on twitter also because a lot of the most prolific voices there are solo devs who are "building in public". A greenfield, solo project is the ideal (only?) use case for running 5 agents in parallel or whatever. Codex is probably amazing at that. But it's not practical for building in enterprise contexts IMO.