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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Codex CLI had some huge upgrades in the past few months.

Before the GPT-5 release it was a poor imitation IMO - in the macOS terminal it somehow even disabled copy and paste!

Codex today is almost unrecognizable in comparison to that version. It's really good. I use both it and Claude Code almost interchangeably at the moment and I'm not really feeling that one is notably better than the other.

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Between codex and Claude code, I am using both on two entirely different projects, so it's not a fair comparison, but the two things Claude has in my unscientific testing is a better plan mode (though having to use the magic password ultrathink belies needing to learn how to prompt it properly) resulting in a better and longer Todo.md (but again, the two projects between the two are very different, so don't consider it a scientific comparison). The other thing that Claude code has that codex does not is a more advanced ability to run things in the background, both as in "npm run dev"/other webserver in the background and being able to run curl/whatever against it, and gather logs from the webserver, error message or otherwise. The other thing is Claude code can be told to run things "in sub-agents" and work on multiple things simultaneously. If there is a way to get codex to do it, it won't tell me and says it can't do that. Not that I necessarily believe it. My experience with codex is that, despite instructions in agents.md, it'll forget and get its wires crossed. I'm using --model gpt-5-codex, and codex reports version 0.42.0.

Codex CLI doesn't have a plan mode right? So how are you planning?

I tell it explicitly in the prompt. "Make a plan to make thing, Ask me clarifying questions. Save the plan in todo.md"

My terminal agent is a Go bubbletea app and it too disables copy/paste and I haven't bothered to figure out why. Of course, I am also not the 5th most visited site on the Internet (more's the pity).

One workaround I found as using iTerm2 instead of Terminal.app and then using a weird keyboard combo, I think it was Cmd + Option + mouse drag.

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