I'm convinced the $20 gpt plus plan is the best plan right now. You can use Codex with gpt5.2. I've been very impressed with this.
(I also have the same MBP the author has and have used Aider with Qwen locally.)
I'm convinced the $20 gpt plus plan is the best plan right now. You can use Codex with gpt5.2. I've been very impressed with this.
(I also have the same MBP the author has and have used Aider with Qwen locally.)
From my personal experience it's around 50:50 between Claude and Codex. Some people strongly prefer one over the other. I couldn't figure out yet why.
I just can't accept how slow codex is, and that you can't really use it interactively because of that. I prefer to just watch Claude code work and stop it once I don't like the direction it's taking.
From my point of view, you're either choosing between instruction following or more creative solutions.
Codex models tend to be extremely good at following instructions, to the point that it won't do any additional work unless you ask it to. GPT-5.1 and GPT-5.2 on the other hand is a little bit more creative.
Models from Anthropics on the other hand is a lot more loosy goosy on the instructions, and you need to keep an eye on it much more often.
I'm using models interchangeably from both providers all the time depending on the task at hand. No real preference if one is better then the other, they're just specialized on different things
bit the bullet this week and paid for a month of claude and a month of chatgpt plus. claude seems to have much lower token limits, both aggregate and rate-limited and GPT-5.2 isn't a bad model at all. $20 for claude is not enough even for a hobby project (after one day!), openai looks like it might be.
I feel like a lot of the criticism the GPT-5.x models receive only applies to specific use cases. I prefer these models over Anthropic's because they are less creative and less likely to take freedoms interpreting my prompts.
Sonnet 4.5 is great for vibe coding. You can give it a relatively vague prompt and it will take the initiative to interpret it in a reasonable way. This is good for non-programmers who just want to give the model a vague idea and end up with a working, sensible product.
But I usually do not want that, I do not want the model to take liberties and be creative. I want the model to do precisely what I tell it and nothing more. In my experience, te GPT-5.x models are a better fit for that way of working.
A lot of the criticism from GPT-5.x models stems from the fact they're dog slow so you end up paying with your own time.