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).