Ok long time Claude Code user here; lately I've started to realize there's other great models out there I should be trying, but I'm hesitant to leave Claude Code behind for something new.
What's the consensus today on codex vs claude code, does it really matter anymore?
My final answer on this is that we just can't say anything affirmative because all of our projects/codebases are completely different. I've gone back and forth on the "codex vs claude" being better, and while I'm currently of the believe that Claude is superior, I understand that might be the case for _my_ particular set of projects and _my_ personal way of interacting with the model.
Codex has arguably been better than Claude Code for months now, but it's flown under the radar because it just didn't capture the same viral marketing effect and OpenAI in general has had more optics / PR issues than Anthropic amongst the online developer crowd. I use the word "better" not in the sense that the underlying GPT models are fundamentally smarter or more intelligent, but rather that as a product Codex is just simpler, cheaper, and abundantly reliable and low-drama.
I’d argue the opposite. I’ve switched back and forth from one to the other and Opus/Fable has been constantly better than any GPT in my daily work. It’s a bit slower but it does the things right, with as little code as possible, some comments where needed. Codex is faster but you always have to correct it because it got something wrong; it writes tons of code ("let me add a small helper") with obvious comments.
Purely anecdotally the one persistent issue I have with LLMs writing code is that they are absolutely paranoid and add a load of indirection and defensive crap and even if you prompt to avoid that it will often require manual steering to remove the cruft.
I’ve experienced this with GPT but not with Opus/Fable.
Fallbacks and backward compatibility are killing me :) So many code paths that just don't fail predictably.
recent gpts are horrendous for this, whereas recent claudes have a tic where they incessantly add useless comments referring to previous changes and will use multiple single-line comments instead of a standard multi-line docblock.
Sounds like my code. They may have been trained on my code!
I have not noticed this with Opus 4.6+. The result is usually not too far from what I would have written myself.
Opus 4.6 was the best model in the family, following two ones were seriously brain damaged to do well on benchmarks.
yeah those have been horrible
Sounds like you are talking past each other. GP is saying the harness of codex is higher quality, which I can believe, even if the models are not as good as Opus/Fable.
i don't think so, i think it's 50% what work people are doing, 50% vibes. my experience with 5.5 is i like it more and get better results than 4.8/fable. which isn't to say i think it's a strictly better model, just been working better for me.
What do you mean "i don't think so"? What is it about the comment you are replying to that you don't think?
GPT-5.5 is as good though, at least according to my personal experience and DeepSWE
yes, much faster, more token efficient and quality is also similar
I'm not sure how meaningful this is. Fable only just recently become more broadly available, and GPT-5.6 is launching broadly today.
I really love the Opus/Fable models but I'm honestly sick to death of the buggy product. The CLI always has some weird issue. Right now it doesn't even output messages before tool calls, it just swallows them and they disappear.
I don't like OpenAI as a company, but they appear to have QA, and that is probably enough to get me to switch.
There was an issue on Claude Code the other day where it would only wait 60 seconds when it had asked a set of questions, then if it didn't get a response from the user it would just continue however it thought was best. Completely unusable. It took them nearly 48 hours to merge a fix.
That sounds intentional though.
Yes it was an intentionally added feature, that was extremely bad.
Glad I’m not the only one noticing this. It’s maddening.
Using remote control I will choose a model but Claude will always revert to Haiku for the first turn.
Basic stuff about features that are more than a week old just get no attention at all. From the outside Athropic seems to be a clear feature factory.
I have both as well. I trust the output of Claude to a higher degree than what I get with Codex. I always have claude review codex output. That being said, I find gpt 5.5 more generically useful at a wider breadth of tasks. Straight coding though, it's no contest.
Obligatory YMMV, maybe your prompting style fits gpt better. We forget that this matters a lot
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> Codex is faster but you always have to correct it because it got something wrong
this has been my experience with Codex as well, and I have to fix its mistakes every single time. But recently, I literally threw away three hours of work because it kept adding hundreds of lines to my code base. When I restarted the entire work using Fable and Opus, it was like night and day.
Agreed. GPT 5.5 will come up with more straightforward solutions with far fewer tokens than Claude. Also, the usage limits are much more generous for Codex than Claude Code for the same monthly plan.
Last time I used Codex it would make loads of assumptions, often quite big ones, without asking.
Did they fix that, as that for me was what actually made codex worse.
I find that I have to tell GPT and Claude to keep asking me questions, or they will just fill in the gaps themselves (wrongly).
Did you use plan mode?
I keep trying Codex and it constantly produces terrible output compared to Opus. I don’t understand how my results are so bad?
That's a strange statement... It's been true for a while now that OpenAI has had much more generous limits than Anthropic on their subscription plans. And with the Fable ban/guardrails disaster, there has been a lot of frustration from people in these comment sections. And Anthropic fucked up Claude Code pretty badly for a couple of weeks during the 4.6/4.7/4.8 transition, which again was widely publicized. And they got a lot of flack over not allowing other harnesses anymore. And ChatGPT got some pretty viral wins on model intelligence when they cracked the high profile Erdos problem.
If anything the online optics have been bad for Anthropic for the last half year. OpenAI doesn't have optics issues, from my point of view they simply have the issue that they are the least trustworthy player at the frontier. The way they pivoted from their original mission is truly breathtaking, especially coming in gloatingly to take the government contract when Anthropic got kicked out for insisting the government does not use their systems for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons systems. You understand what that means, right? OpenAI models are now actively used/developed for mass surveilance and/or autonomous weapons systems.
I know there are plenty here who seem to value their own ability to use these models cheaply above all other considerations. Then OpenAI is a great choice, and much less restrictive than Anthropic. But their problem is not on the optics. It's on the substance.
I really want a good Claude Design competitor in Codex, it's hard to use the others after getting used to it and yet I find anthropic's model to have a much worse understanding of what looks good or not than OpenAI or Google models.
Switched to Codex last week, and I'm already MUCH happier than I have been with Claude Code. Which surprised me.
Nudged by this thread, I've decided to switch from Claude to Codex for a bit to see what happens. But...I immediately became lost in their marketing vortex of confusion on plans and pricing. Anyone care to tell me which plan I should be using? On the other side I use the $100 Claude Code plan. We actually have a "Business" ChatGPT subscription already, which seems to be $50/mo/seat. OpenAI's web site offers a set of individual subscriptions (for parity with CC presumably) which I suspect weren't available when we signed up for ChatGPT. I think that in turn happened due to some web site feature it didn't allow for free users (uploading PDFs, something like that). Perhaps I should switch from that business account to an individual subscription for Codex?
Test-drive it with an individual Pro account (5x or 20x) for a month. Download the Codex CLI client from https://github.com/openai/codex and auth it in the browser via the URL it provides. Set the model to 5.6-Sol and effort to max.
What about cost?
Honestly it’s the usage limits that are so generous that makes codex worth it even if it may not be exactly as powerful as Claude. The peace of mind that you can try a lot of things and make huge refactors and run extensive redundant tests without running out of tokens just makes the whole thing a much better experience. I tried coding with Deepseek and it was pretty terrible so the only reason codex works is because its abilities are close to or on par with Claude.
There is so much less drama involved with the Codex world. You don't realize how oppressive CC is until you've escaped it. Outages, weird restrictions, degradation, accelerated usage, etc etc etc.
Totally. My experience as well. After some time with codex you're like come on Claude can you just stfu! Haha. I now almost always instruct Claude with specific length requirements when I ask questions. Otherwise, it just blathers and blathers in the most annoying of ways. "Oppressive" is spot on in my opinion
I'll agree and expand on "weird restrictions" -- I used to check the claude usage graphs multiple times a day to see where I'm at on my weekly budget. With gpt 5.5 I don't think I'm working differently but haven't felt the need to check anything because I think I've hit my limit... once? on some egregious edge case scenario iirc
> accelerated usage
Can you post more information about this?
Even less drama with open models like GLM.
Let alone getting banned out right with no reason, zero updates after weeks, and not even being able to download your chat history (despite the feature being available (I assume they vibe coded it and it does not work!). My story below;
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597861
Um, the 'codex world' is the OpenAI world and there is a ton of drama and product confusion there!
Anthropic has certainly had some drama inflicted on them by the US administration, but otherwise they have just had heads down and executed with great focus. That is why they have succeeded.
At least Anthropic doesn't bend down to Pentagon/Trump administration
I've been using Claude Code, Codex, Gemini (now Antigravity) at the same time for half year now, ever since I dipped my toe into agentic coding. I'd say in general Claude Code and Codex are equally powerful, Gemini is lagging behind.
One thing I appreciate with Codex is, OpenAI nowadays sometimes just gives you quota resets you can bank, so when you use up weekly quota before the week ends, you could just reset the quota, to continue using Codex. I've been much less anxious about Codex quota because of this perk. I just used one reset in the bank yesterday, and still have 3 resets left. Whereas with Claude, when you've used 95% quota 3 days before the week ends, you'd be much more anxious.
On the other hand, Claude Code's /remote-control mechanism is extremely helpful when I am running it in the cloud and wants to monitor it or control it on my phone. Codex currently doesn't support this kind of usage. Codex only allows you to use your phone to connect to a session on your desktop, not in the cloud.
I’ve found Codex’s overage to be much better value than Claude’s. A monthly $10 budget is plenty for my backup Codex usage, but on Claude Code that would be gone in a couple of days.
> OpenAI nowadays sometimes just gives you quota resets you can bank
That's actually pretty awesome. Anthropic's random resets often have me scrambling to launch huge sessions to make the most of them before the weekly rollover. The gacha-like mechanics are maddening.
Yes - Anthropic badly needs this same "here's a reset, use it when you want".
It's vastly better this way. Sure, it may impact the bottom line but it's a huge customer satisfaction win.
When Anthropic randomly resets me and I've only used 2%, that's worthless. When OpenAI tells me I have 3 resets available to use whenever I want - it's wonderful.
Codex is supported well on iPhone/iPad, it’s inside the ChatGPT app.
It’s amazing how much work you can get done on your phone now, especially if you already have a design mapped out in your head.
I have used claude and codex extensively but only from their CLI app (heavily sandboxed using rootless podman, network filtering, etc), so I don't really know what I'm missing with the GUI apps.
One killer feature that Claude has, and AFAIK Codex still lacks, is the ability to start a session in the terminal and then hand it off (actually just remotely control it), from the iOS app.
Last time I tried Codex on iOS it required a ton of set up to link a github project etc. The way claude lets me remote into a session I've already started on my actual machine is much better IMHO.
They’ve addressed that. Codex in the ChatGPT app on iOS is way better than Claude Code now.
You sign in the Codex app on your Mac same on iOS and are able to completely control your sessions - fork, side chats, plugins - everything.
It’s really great i often work through it. And you can connect any number of Codex instances on any number of macs and then manage them all through the iOS app.
maybe I'm misunderstanding but I don't want to sign into the app on a mac - I want to run the CLI on a headless linux server and control the sessions from my iPhone. Does Codex allow that now?
I do that with Termux on my Android phone. I set up dynamic DNS and wireguard on my router so I can reach my LAN from anywhere. I just enable wireguard and ssh in.
Not sure if there's a Termux equivalent for iPhone.
You can do it too. There are two ways:
1. Run `codex remote-control --help` directly on your Linux server. 2. From the desktop app, connect to your Linux box, start Codex there, and make it remotely controllable.
Either approach will get you set up.
Hmm, I don't have a desktop computer. I prefer my laptop be used for other purposes, and can sleep when not in use, instead of running a coding agent 24x7. That's why I prefer running coding agents in the cloud.
You can do that too. Start working locally, then just do /handoff to transfer your session to the cloud and then work through the Codex app on your phone.
I've been using codex app server. Works great.
https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/app-server
Hmm, thanks. Didn't know about this. But looks like a bunch of hassle to set it up?
Finding the right docs/flags took longer than anything else. 15 mins from zero to productive on my phone.
One thing I noticed you can't use codex installed via npm, but it will tell you that. Ymmv I'm a pretty simple user and do things in small manageable chunks. I try keep context < 10% before I fire off a task so I don't use many skills etc.
if you don't want to hassle with it, use desktop app, you either can make it remote controllable or you can control other devboxes.
I recommend trying Codex too. In fact, I recommend running them side-by-side if you have the budget, e.g. have both independently plan the same feature or implement in a different worktree, or have them critique each other's work.
I personally find GPT-5.5 to be a better programmer than Opus 4.8, it is extremely thorough, but I don't like the code it generates ("austere"), and find Opus 4.8 to write more "human friendly" code. The programming comments GPT-5.5 makes is pretty awful where-as Opus 4.8 is good. I feel like Opus 4.8 is better at grasping my intention than GPT-5.5, and honestly find GPT-5.5 to be kind of "autistic". I do prefer the language (not the writing) of GPT-5.5, as I find the philosophical flowery language of Opus 4.8 kind of annoying.
I have only managed to try Fable 5 a little bit, which feels like a much more generally smarter version of Opus 4.8, that is much better a programming and grasping your intention, and I think even the intention of your code, and is _really_ good at spotting bugs or problems with logic in your code. It feels wicked smart but is extemely expensive. It feels smart in the sense like it has a "bigger brain" and is much more sensitive to subtleties/details.
These are different "brains", have different "personalities", etc. I think the best thing is to develop a feeling for it yourself.
I haven't tried Codex yet, but I for my tasks GPT-5.5 may correctly point to a proper direction but its code feels a bit weird. Opus 4.8 is way better in coding, and actually it's the only one who could catch very very sophisticated bug in a large codebase (I tried different models including GPT-5.5 and DeepSeek). Interestingly Gemma 4 under opencode running locally performs not bad at all, it's far yet from DeepSeek level, but it manages to understand tools quite well, and code quality is pretty good. So, for simple coding projects I can say local models already won. It's amazing how smart open models of desktop size have become today. I mean it's quite plausible to manage small codebase today relying on only open tools and local models, you don't need any subscription to produce high quality code, but yes I assume you already experienced and know what you're doing :)
Claude Code fan here... Codex is very good. Sometimes better. The killer feature is price.
After 6+ months of exclusive Claude Code usage, I was begrudgingly forced to try Codex once Anthropic rejiggered their limits such that I kept maxing out my $200/mo plan in just a few days. These days I pay both $200/mo plans, and it's just about enough to get me through a week's work (small game studio - infinite code to write!)
> (small game studio - infinite code to write!)
Curious: what multiplier do you think your productivity has increased by, from before AI?
In terms of ability to ship? Easily tenfold. We literally ship 10 times more than before AI. This does not, however, translate into a tenfold increase in actual business success, of course :)
Genuine question/not a critique-are you actually reviewing all that code or just sending it and hoping for the best? I just can't imagine someone is reading/reviewing that much code every day, but maybe I'm wrong?
Like before AI, the scrutiny varies with the sensitivity of the area being edited.
Simple UI change? I do an AI review, but otherwise neither read nor write the code. The models are good enough they write better UI code than me, 9 out of 10 times. Not always the more idiomatic, but usually safer and more correct.
Change to our core data plane? I might spend 2-3 times more effort reviewing it than before AI. Yes, I go more slowly than pre-AI. Many more reviews, many more angles considered, including both human and (lots of) AI review cycles.
Most code is not that critical, and AI is also scarily good at writing tests. We also spend considerably more time paying down tech debt and testing thanks to AI, now that the cost is near-zero.
Net: I spend 10-25X less time on low-risk changes. I often direct (or at least approve) the implementation approach, but I rarely read this code. I spend 2-3X more time on high-risk changes. In both cases, I never write code "by hand". Since about November, I've had no reason to actually edit code in a code editor (perhaps maybe except .env files, which we don't allow agents to edit for obvious reasons).
AI is a tool. You can use it to go fast recklessly, or you can use it to go slow with confidence. Just like before AI... the skill and art of engineering is knowing when to do which.
> AI is also scarily good at writing tests
:-) I hope you read those tests before claiming it's "scary good"
Indeed, much of the scariness is how fearlessly and confidently it writes them with little regard to their actual usefulness or value. When I find it adding a lot of tests, I often say something like: "audit each test carefully, and consider whether the test is testing a meaningful boundary or is more ceremonial. delete low-value tests and add new tests to cover meaningful boundaries not exercised by the gaps you identify". Without fail, this always produces some decent results.
Having said that, in truth, I almost never read the unit tests. Before AI, we had almost none (see: several person game studio) so the tradeoff is not "AI-generated tests" vs "human written ones", it's whether we have tests at all. So, I take them for what they're worth - not much - but if it catches an extra regression before it ships every now and then, it was worth it for the price (~free).
What does your workflow look like tool wise? Are you still using IDE?
No. I used to use Cursor, but now my workflow is that I use an inhouse CLI tool I wrote called "bud" that wraps/seeds the harnesses per-worktree, and boots a full copy of the game so each worktree can work independently. If git worktrees solve the problem of code isolation, bud solves the problem of isolating everything else. It's about 15K lines of rust, and I use it 100 times a day or so. It's sort of a layer on top of a harness like codex/claude code.
I have 10+ of these workspaces in parallel, and I context switch between them as I get blocked on things. I manage the workspaces using `herder`, which is a terrific tmux-like tool that allows me to keep those workspaces on a nixOS machine I have at home that I SSH into via tailscale, so my agents don't stop working every time I close my laptop (it also lets me leverage that machine's computing resources instead of running dozens of servers and harnesses on my poor MacBook).
It never really mattered (except when codex was very new). If anything, codex's remote session integration is better, so outside of some "ultracode" orchestration bells/whistles where Claude Code is ahead, I think Codex is a better tool.
Agree, I think there was just a blind study that showed no one could tell the difference even though the users were avid they could
Codex has been good for a long time, more expensive but very focused on efficiency. Working with it feels faster and more to the point than Opus models and I trust it more with long-running jobs. Also regular resets vs being at the whim of Anthropic drama all the time is hella nice.
Codex is cheaper on average no? I think the models are expensive but the token efficiency of the harness itself solves the problem.
Yes that's what I meant, the per token cost is higher but as you say the efficiency levels it out / works slightly in Codex's favour.
Anyone know what the deal is with the resets?
They've discovered it's a good marketing strategy. Whenever there's an outage, or a new launch, there's often a reset with it, which helps keep people engaged with OAI / Tibo and reduces churn.
They've also introduced banked resets, which are really clever. If you have a $200/month plan and three banked resets, you're not churning because you will overweight giving up those resets (loss aversion theory).
I ran out of resets :( hehe I had 3 and used them all
I run my AI agent as a different user (in addition to using the sandbox functionality provided by cc/codex). It does not seem possible to run the Codex GUI as a different user. I can run the TUI (/Applications/Codex.app/Contents/Resources/codex) but it has the shortcoming that remote control is only available in the GUI.
I installed the Claude Code Codex skill provided by Anthropic and I am having Claude invoke it automatically to review all plans and changes. The nice thing about this is that for an additional $20/month pro plan I can extend the runway for Claude rate limiting and compare frontier model responses. I am looking for more ways now to work in Codex as a subagent that gets used automatically from Claude Code.
> does it really matter anymore?
They're different models with different philosophies behind them. This is anecdotal with a user group of 1, but in my experience:
Claude has a stronger personality and is more creative. If you give it vague instructions, it's better at filling in the blanks with reasonable ideas.
GPT-5.5 is better at following instructions. If you know exactly what you want, it will do it without going off the rails. It's also less likely to imply that you're dumb, but I don't really care about that. Some people do.
I’ve found that Claude is very literal. When I talk to 5.5 it gets what i want it to do, when I talk to Opus 4.8 it does what I say literally and doesn’t get the intent behind it.
I had to switch to Opencode from Claude code because the latter wasn’t supporting GitHub Copilot as model provider.
I didn’t think I could have found a better solution, spawning multiple subagents with different models is such a great thing.
I built in the past very small cli wrappers to call other models; Claude Code often refuses to do that, lies and does the job itself instead of delegating to another provider’s llms.
Personally, I started using openai models to mess with other harnesses. I was pretty oppositional to CC and how they don't let you kinda plug and play freely, or give transparency into -p usage with other harnesses. So i mix and match a bunch of openai and some chinese models im trying out into opencode. I keep hearing codex is great, on the tier of current CC, I've tried it and it just ate my entire 5 hour usage window looping without asking for clarification on something and none of it was usable. that was the only time i tried codex as i could got that same task done with maybe 20% of my window with my existing openai opencode workflow.
I had put a decent amount of effort into setting up that initial codex attempt and it went so poorly that i've been entirely uninterested in trying again. This was maybe a month or so ago, and i know stuff moves fast, but for me, i like the models, dont care for the harness.
I personally use opencode so I can swap between models and try different options. I'd say I prefer claude (fable and opus 4.8) so far, but curious to see where gpt 5.6 lands.
For personal stuff, I've been pretty happy with chatgpt's $20 plan. I believe it has considerably higher limits than claude's $20 plan, and it's enough for the personal stuff I play with (hermes, and some small coding stuff). Also allows me to keep up to date on openai models.
The $20 GPT plan with GPT 5.5 lasted me, somehow, exactly one smallish fixup feature
Which limit? Weekly or 5 hour?
I've been using it with hermes and some coding (with opencode), and I am getting a LOT more than one feature out of it, but the work is spread throughout the week.
I can't tell the difference between Fable and GPT 5.5. I tried Fable while it was in trial $20 mode, used up my whole quota, and it was great, but as soon as I went back to GPT 5.5, everything was the same.
But what I love about Openai is that they still let you hook OTHER harnesses up to a subscription. My Pi setup has been built up for a few months now into exactly what I want and moving over to CC or even Codex is really annoying.
Caveat: I vibe code in tiny little chunks. I see what I want to do, and exactly how I want it done, then prompt that, refine, what was output, then repeat. I bet Fable is better at building a whole app from a 2-sentence prompt; but that's just not important to me at all.
Same here - gave 5.5 a web design to implement and it sucked. Gave the same to Fable and it still sucked.
did you use Claude design, their tool meant for Web design? because if not then you're the problem .
I did. It was still Claude that’s the problem
If plenty of other people are having success with the same tool, perhaps it's not the tool.
Perhaps you could explain why they are the problem.
Not sure about the consensus, but during an entire week I have done every task on my workplace with both Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5. GPT won hands down. I would even sometimes copy the plans and solutions (using different Git worktrees) from GPT and paste it on Opus and itself would say GPT plans were better. At that point I have migrated. Fable is not enabled in our workspace so I have not tried.
Claude lost my trust around February this year when the plan would say nonsensical things as "delete this method" that was clearly a key method on that part of the codebase.
For personal projects I am using Codex 20$ plan and when that is over I use DeepSeek which is insanely good for the cost.
Use a harness that doesn't lock you into a moat, like OpenCode.
You can use Codex with any endpoint compatible with OpenAI Response API[1], like llama.cpp.
[1]: https://unsloth.ai/docs/basics/codex
FWIW Claude Code works with OpenRouter so you can use any model.
CC system prompt is bloated, use Pi to test Codex instead
Codex is open source and lets you use any model https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/config-file/config-advanced#o...
Only its CLI is open source. The desktop app is always proprietary.
Codex CLI is open source too. I don't think there is a difference.
Can't use a claude code subscription in another harness though
Don't use providers that don't allow it.
You can however for now use wrappers which are not harnesses such as T3Code though. They were going to cut under the Programmatic API, but have at least temporarily walked it back.
You absolutely can; they are not banning anymore. The bigger problem is that subscription versions of the models are way crappier than when the "same" model is hit via API (Bedrock/Vertex)
You can also make it not count against extra usage.
OpenCode docs show it because Anthropic specifically ambushed them with a PR to remove support so simpletons can't use it easily.
This is not at all aligned with my experience. Do you have a source for this?
The opencode docs[0] still say otherwise, do you have a source?
[0] https://opencode.ai/docs/providers/#anthropic
I am curious about the claim that the subscription models are different. Has anyone benchmarked this?
maybe he meant about server-side features? otherwise its dumb. OAI and Anthropic are using azure/aws/gcp...
How does that work? Doesn't that mean Microsoft/Amazon/Google have full de facto access to OAI's and Anthropic's model weights and operational processes?
This is one reason it surprised me that Anthropic decided to run stuff on Musk's hardware. It seems overwhelmingly likely that the new Grok release is informed by what Musk has been able to learn from that relationship.
Do you have a source for that?
They aren't banning it anymore, they just make it count as "extra usage". e.g. you're paying for every token in addition to your subscription.
Further, the claim that the subscription "version" of the model is worse sounds like bullshit (and the sort of anecdotal nonsense that you see on sites like this). Do you have anything substantiating this?
I use both. Both are great. But in terms of Desktop Apps I think Codex has the better UI. It's more straightforward, just works, and has small conveniences like the open in editor icon.
Claude's very bloated and convoluted by comparison. Maybe you need the bloat (Claude Design), but I prefer the more razor's edge efficiency of Codex.
Model wise, I can't really tell. They all do what I want them to do most of the time and go off the rails occasionally. The question is increasingly becoming who's faster and cheaper and gives me more tokens, not who's better.
> What's the consensus today on codex vs claude code, does it really matter anymore?
Consensus is probably the wrong word for the popular opinions reflected in HN that you might get.
I would recommend that you have 2 of each at all times when it comes to AI so you don't necessarily become overly locked to quirks of one thing. You'll soon realize that things move so fast that you just start internalizing common patterns instead of depending on one specific vendor.
I recommend that you try pi and codex besides claude, to get your own feel for it.
I spent the last couple days switching because Anthropic keeps locking stuff behind API pricing. OpenAI lets you do anything with your sub right now. I'm building headless and web interfaces around Pi.dev. I had this previously with Claude Code but they are going to lock away all those features. I think the Claude does a better job at being proactive to solving things, but I'm going to keep tweaking my harness to nudge gpt to do more in it's turn. Not sure!
Now we have various Opus+ level models (Opus/Fable, Grok 4.5, GPT 5.6) I prefer to focus on price/speed and harness as models are all generally good enough for coding. (Fable is overkill for 90% of work but is still level above). So I use Grok Build with 4.5 as its VERY fast and cheap, Codex is next best for me with sol/lunar 5.6. and Claude Code Fable for the 10% of tasks that need that level of reasoning. However I find Claude Code harness responsiveness much less than other two (all TUI versions) I wish they would fix this.
Am I missing something or isn't sol/lunar 5.6 only out for like 3 hours? How did you evaluate?
Set yourself up to be able to try / switch between models easily. I was a claude only user and just have my user level AGENTS.md for codex and others simply point at my user CLAUDE.md. Have a script that syncs my skills (just directories) between all models. Also, if you want to use /simplify or similar from claude in another model, you can ask claude for the prompt and put that in a skill for the other models.
In my experience, for coding Codex is definitely far ahead of Claude Code, even when using Fable 5 as a model.
you have a very strange experience
People work on different things, fail to mention their field of usage in the comments, and then misunderstand the experiences of others who do the same. Repeat ad nauseam.
he's writing novels
More literal, less fluid verbally, harder time understanding nuance, more correct code, fewer bugs. Less pretty UI. I switch back and forth but find I have less 'clean up' work with codex; more upfront communication though to properly specify. High hopes for 5.6!
Don't know about consensus, but I personally still find Opus to be better for sniffing codebase intent and checking things as a whole, while Codex seems more detail-oriented for individual files.
Personally I use Open Code with a copilot sub. Then all models are available in my session with just a /model and /variants command combo. Makes it super low friction to try different models & combos (my favourite right now is DeepSeek V4 Flash for initial PRD then Fable 5 high for implementation).
I had great results combining the two. If you (or your employer) can afford then you can ping-pong the models in the plan phase (not really ping-pong as humans should get a say too) and then let one implement and the other review. I got better results working this way than just to stick to a single model.
I consistently have better results with Codex for the work that I do. People have been saying that for six months, but until 5.4 the experience was sufficiently slower that it wasn't worth the switch. Making the switch was frictionless. Give it a try
Claude Code is not the model, it's the harness. You can use any model you want with Claude Code to varying degrees of success. I use Qwen3.6-27b daily with Claude Code as an example.
I use both. Not because I am cool, but because it is cost effective for personal projects with two $20 / month plans. It is also nice to be able to see what the state of the art is like for both.
Personally, I find it very interchangeable. I open codex --yolo or claude with whatever there yolo flag is (have an alias).
I use Conductor pretty much exclusively and it makes it incredibly easy to try different models, even within the same workspace - definitely recommend giving it a shot. Whenever I'm forced to use the Claude Code app directly it just seems woefully inadequate compared to Conductor
If you can afford it and you have something to justify the expense, I would get both. they're interesting to run side by side, you can hand things off from one to the other. Pretty neat. Unfortunately now I just want to have both :(
I'm also a long-time Claude Code user here, though the last 3 weeks I've been doing loops having claude use codex to review until they reach consensus; uses tons of tokens but the result is really good.
I'm trying Codex as my primary the last day or so, because I'm at 98% use and reset in 3 days on Claude. I'm worried about a lot of our skills and CLAUDE.mds and the like getting lost unless I migrate them, but otherwise codex seems to be working great.
IMO LMArena is the best benchmark that avoids benchmaxxing
https://arena.ai/leaderboard/agent
5.6 isn’t on there yet but Fable leads by a significant margin atm
The results here match up to my real-world experience using these models every day at work and switching between them regularly.
I prefer codex for most tasks, but stil use Claude if i need to make something "nice but generic", i.e. a html artefact or touch up of front end code.
Consensus itself does NOT matter, omp is objectively the best harness for power users yet it has 0 hn posts about it, zero.
You're fully free to use and try anything and without caring about what others think is right
omp is really good.
I have one non technical people in my firm using it. One is using it to assist with editing books, basically using it to gather up manuscripts from e-mail / Google Doc etc. submissions, and then switch models between a cheap one and Opus (for actually analysing the manuscript).
The other non-technical person has done really surprising things with it AI, like a long-running GPT 5.5 Pro chat session which is basically her expense tracker - it has an .xlsx file "carried" in the chat, and she just tells ChatGPT (or scans a receipt) whenever she has a new expense, and then prompts it in natural language when she needs a report. I'm looking forward to seeing what she can do with omp.
I figured pi itself would be the best harness because it's barebones and you make it what you want. omp is to pi what doom is to emacs is what lazyvim is to neovim.
The fact that I thought that this was amp misspelled until i someone validate omp and the checked myself indicates it's a subjective assertion at best.
Because it's a bunch of extension on top of on pi
How can this be "objective"? Surely its subjective.
I've tried a fuck load of harnesses but keep coming back to Codex as my harness.
omp is amazing. Daily driver for me.
omp.sh is unreadable. I've tried understanding what exactly this is and it's just a wall of edgy sounding slop.
"objectively the best"?
To quote a friend:
> Well it's objective _to me_
Probably means subjectively according to his own opinion...
Absolutely. It's the only harness that is actually RSI and not run by idiots.
> omp is objectively the best harness for power users
Care to detail this?
The harness is so much better than cc which is a buggy mess. Gpt is also way faster than Claude. I’ve been using gpt for a while now and I know a lot of people that swapped away from Anthropic for multiple reasons. However - fable still seems to be the best coding agent, it’s just slow and the harness sucks. So I still use it in some rare cases like to review codex. I’m hoping 5.6 lets me drop it entirely.
My experience is that Codex's auto review is extremely costly, with $20 on both sides, I can run CC with auto mode for longer than with Codex's auto review enabled. Also in my own experience Claude's usage is actually bigger than Codex, but I am not sure if that's due to I stick to 5.5 with Codex while keep Sonnet as the default to orchestrate other models in CC.
A few less obvious niceties of Codex:
- built-in image generation using your subscription, which can be super handy
- can actually edit Google Docs and Google Sheets (Claude can only create new or sometimes append)
- I get a surprising amount of mileage out of the $20 plan
They both have their places for sure.
IME it entirely depends on your work. I find myself using both daily for different things.
Codex with GPT 5.5 is much better at general SWE tasks but Claude Code with Opus is far better at complex reasoning tasks like reading and summarizing research papers, replicating experiments, identifying research gaps and proposing interesting follow ups.
Codex app is a much different experience than CC CLI. I would try it out for a couple days with the new model suite and see what you prefer after that.
I have found Claude Code to be so much better than other common harnesses that it's kept me solely in the Anthropic ecosystem.
I sub both codex and claude at 20x. I like opus+fable more than gpt5.5 because it seems gpt tries to finish tasks by leaving any ambiguity unresolved. claude seems better at surfacing open questions.
This is using the same AGENTS.md prompts, which were designed firstly for Claude use, so maybe it's something that could be optimized better if I understood gpt as well?
If you can afford to test it seriously, running both in parallel, it's worth a test to see which you prefer. If you can't, don't bother. You're not likely missing anything since they are close to personal preference with most people I know who have meaningfully tried both preferring Claude
It's trivial to try another agent. You can spend $20 for a monthly subscription and ask it to import all your settings from Claude Code.
Last time I tested Codex on a cheap plan, it barely lasted an hour? I think this was for the $20 plan. I was afraid to try the more expensive plan after that. Not sure, I might just outright rip my Claude Code bandaid if the current usage quotas do die off after the 17th or whatever date they said they would "return on".
You wouldn't be leaving Claude Code, just trying something new. If you don't like it just resume using Claude.
They blocked Claude from being used in a different harness as well squeezed the usage like crazy. Switched to Codex and haven't cared since.
Between the two the biggest difference by far is ... getting your harness / AGENTS.md / skills / tools set up right.
I left Claude for Codex months ago. I was an early Claude Code adopter but I have found Codex consistently better since about the February time frame. And far more reliable.
It's more diligent and empirical and results focused, and less creative. It sometimes needs a kick to avoid a Zeno's paradox of incremental steps to get to the goal. But it produces more reliable code with fewer race conditions, unhandled negative cases, etc.
It's also better value from a $$ POV, or at least has been. This fluctuates a bit.
You're also free to use your Codex subscription with other harnesses, like opencode, etc. Unlike Anthropic. Plays better with others.
The answer is it depends. Claude's generally better at frontend and debugging tasks, while Codex is stronger at backend features and exploratory work. They have very different coding styles and thus very different strengths.
Any actual data backing this up? Or is this just your personal experience?
Just personal experience, I just find it way easier to do frontend work with Claude than it is with Codex.
No, this is all nonsense.
It is so hard to tell at this point between the models to make generalizations like this.
Just complete nonsense.
Not sure there's going to be a consensus, but I can tell you that when i have codex review claude-written code, it finds important gaps and fixes. The reverse is also true. Both are powerful, but even better when used in combination
Have been long time clauder but honestly codex feels much more liberating. Something you can't buy..
For me the biggest shift was using Deepseek through an American provider with reasonix as the harness, making cache hits at a rate of practically free.
Try OpenCode and you can point it at either model
There was just a study showing that when presented blindly no one could tell the difference yet users were avid they could
There _is_ a difference in the way Claude and GPT write. Last Friday I felt Opus was becoming dumb because it was writing like GPT.
I wish they open source their desktop app and built-in skills one day. That would be a final blow for me.
Edit: Found that their built-in skills are actually open-source: https://github.com/openai/plugins
like others said in the thread: much less drama and i'll add much less attitude from the company and the models, overall i'm having much calmer experience with codex, hope it stays that way
I use both especially for checking each others work. Pretty happy with results
They are both excellent but excel in different areas. Fable is super super proactive and great for doing a LOT of work with a single prompt, also for creative work.
Codex is more details focused, often catches wonky bugs and correctness issues that Fable misses, feels more terse and less "friendly", more like a stern senior engineer versus a friendly talkative engineer (Claude). Codex is also better if you're already an engineer, Claude is better for non-engineers. I.e. Codex works better if you know exactly what you want and know the right way of explaining it.
just try it you will back to codex because gpt is trash, I ask for refund under 7 hours
In my projects, Claude writes and Codex reviews, and I've had a lot of code I've been very happy with out of that, although as of today, Grok _also_ reviews, and finds interesting new stuff.
Codex UI is way way way better than Claude Code
- codex UI is much more responsive
- i get feedback about the progress easily
- the tool calls and results are very legible, I can click them and see the progress
- no one talks about this but the tool call and response notification are handled much more elegantly in Codex. In Claude Code, it is handled in a clunky way using loops which always causes some delay
- you can steer the conversation midway in Codex
- /side is underrated (/btw is the equivalent and is much worse in Claude Code)
- I have to admit subagents are handled better in Claude Code
With the exception of Fable which is going away anyway, Codex is better especially after the last couple Opus releases. It’s also no longer slower than Claude.
You get much more generous usage from the 20x plan.
And you get far better uptime.
If benchmarks and early tester impressions are accurate, you also get access to Fable level capability at greater speed and lower cost (included in subscription).
> Fable which is going away anyway
$2 says nah. You can't take Fable away in a week where GPT-5.6 and Grok 4.5 launch, if you want to hold on to customers.
The fact that they already extended subscription Fable once would suggest it won’t be solely locked behind API next week, but at the same time it really does look like they are doing everything they can to avoid serving it continuously at scale.
Knowing Anthropic, this unfortunately might end up meaning a quietly quantized Fable on subscription.
Can anyone explain this "quietly quantized" model idea to me from a business perspective?
Coca-Cola doesn't "quietly water down" its product to save a few bucks. They know people will take a sip, say "oh that's not what i wanted", and go buy a Pepsi.
If they serve me a quantized Fable, I'm just going to think Fable sucks and go get my tokens elsewhere. What's the point?
> Coca-Cola doesn't "quietly water down" its product to save a few bucks. They know people will take a sip, say "oh that's not what i wanted", and go buy a Pepsi.
Coca-Cola is also mostly measurable and reverse-engineerable.
The Claude models are black boxes, and actively curtail distilling efforts.
How are you going to confidently tell the difference between it being slightly dumber, vs just having bad luck with your recent attempts?
Pepsi may not water down its product, but your local diner may well decide to put a little less ice-cream in its milkshakes if it thinks it can get away with it and most people won't be able to tell.
I use Claude for planning, writing CRs, and code review.
Codex writes all of the code, no exceptions.
Works great, especially when you ask Claude to break up large CRs into roughly 10 minutes of Codex work each.
Same here. I find the design, architecture, system design discussion to be better on Claude, but after Opus 4.6 I switched over to Codex for actual coding and love the results. I use both via the CLI and generally tell Claude to output the result of our decisions as a markdown that will be easy to read and implement by an agentic coding tool. Then I fire up Codex and read said markdown as the input of the session and way to build all the appropriate context needed. I see this as a way to step into letting the agents go run on their own and interact with each other, but I still like to steer so I put these manual steps in the flow. Letting the agents go off on their own and one shot big chunks is not reliable enough yet imo.
I do exactly the opposite.
I think the key is to get two LLMs looking at the same problem.
I use Codex because it's better at the kind of code I need written (math-heavy, 3D geometry code).
But if I was doing mainly UI code, I would do the opposite.
> I'm hesitant to leave Claude Code behind for something new.
Codex and Claude Code are not mutually exclusive, you can use both.
I use both constantly for different things. You don't need to be a one-model Andy
Claude Code is a massively bloated agent harness.
Try Pi: https://pi.dev/
Pi is so “unbloated” that it’s extra effort to use. You can decide how much work to put into it. I get the trade off. But this is a big jump from CC. I’d recommend some middle ground like opencode.
Even simpler, use Cursor with any frontier model. I see others sweat to add enough context to Claude Code while Cursor has a ton of contextual awareness, uses subagents automatically and is significantly faster with no drop off I have found. I'm not sure why devs are so enamored with living in the CLI, but Cursor has one of those too.
Similar to running arch Linux. Many people do need to. But many people just like tinkering. Tinkering can lead to positive outcomes but it’s usually not “doing work”.
It's worth trying out OpenCode, then oh-my-pi, and also the commercial harnesses like Codex. (I haven't yet bothered to try Antigravity and have no interest in Gemini-cli now that it's not available except on expensive plans.)
pi is also worth tinkering with, particularly if you have an eye towards automating some things.
what are you building that doesn't work with read,write,edit,bash and skills? Genuinely interested.
better, use oh my pi.
It honestly baffles me how people can ask a question like this and get such a wide spectrum of answers in response. It's all so much based on vibes and anecdotal evidence. I've not really noticed much of a difference in capability since Opus 4.6 and I've used a ton of different models. They all work pretty damn well for me.
I've subscribed to ChatGPT/Codex for over a year and tried a Claude sub twice 1 month each, with a gap of several months in between.
I tried them both side by side, mostly for reviewing existing Godot/GDScript code, or sometimes generating Swift Mac apps, including converting ancient relics I wrote eons ago in Visual Basic on Windows
Codex was consistently better than Claude: https://i.imgur.com/jYawPDY.png
Besides the useless "This is good" findings while reviewing and the excessive "oops you're right" backtracking, Claude's atrocious UX and borderline "spyware" make me never want to try an Anthropic product again for a long long while.
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Literally every top model is identical and anyone saying otherwise is engaging in astrology.
The outputs, ui, and overall behavior (tokenization) are not identical.
anybody saying they're identical clearly doesn't use both...
Honestly, I would even push it further. People who would claim that don't use either one.
The codex software is garbage compared to Claude, but open source is the future, so you should at least switch.
It's not clear replies to this thread aren't openAI employees or incentivized influencers, but every benchmark has gpt-5.5 underperforming opus 4.8, sometimes by as much as 10%.
Can they all be wrong/paid-off?