I probably wouldn’t say they always had the best model but for years OAI was definitely pushing the limits both on model quality and product offerings. It was not until the last year or so that Anthropic started punching above their weight.
I probably wouldn’t say they always had the best model but for years OAI was definitely pushing the limits both on model quality and product offerings. It was not until the last year or so that Anthropic started punching above their weight.
> It was not until the last year or so that Anthropic started punching above their weight.
Anthropic's stuff been useful for the last two years I'd say, especially in the beginning of Claude Code, but as soon as the Codex TUI was available, I was daily-driving both of them, literally executing the same prompts for each of them and comparing the final results, and Codex simply writes better code in 9/10 cases (but still not always).
I was a regular Claude Code user but Codex eventually won me over due to a few factors:
1. Less interaction required over long horizon tasks.
2. You actually get the amount of tokens they advertize. It's been an open secret on r/Claude that over the last several months, due to supposed "bugs" in Claude, users on the Max plan have seen over 50% of their tokens used on a single prompt. Super annoying.
3. Really strong image generation capabilities.
That's not to say OpenAI's current generosity will last, but for now I definitely see Codex as the stronger option between the two.
Claude Code has only been around for a year and change. At least for our internal tests 2 years ago Anthropic models started to at least become semi-useful but they still were not great, they struggled with structured output. Prior to that their alignment strategy made the products highly unhelpful in an API context. The past 6 months to a year is where Anthropic has really shined, they have model parity and sometimes taking the lead and more importantly their product offering on the consumer side has crushed it.
> Claude Code has only been around for a year and change.
We've been experimenting with "agent harnesses" way before that though, I'm sure the first time I tried building that sort of thing was in 2023 sometime with GPT3, and I'm like 80% confident I tried the same sort of TUI experience as CC from some random user before Claude Code even became public.
I feel like aider was the first TUI for agentic stuff I came across here, and that was well before Claude code.