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It's interesting how different the subjective experiences of similarly-capable coding models is. My experience with Codex is that it tends to run off and do things without asking enough questions or keeping me in sync, whereas Claude seems to be more careful to clarify and keep me apprised of what it's doing.

I wonder how much of it comes down to how models "train us" to work in ways they are most effective.

I think a lot of it, Claude is definitely careful and Codex runs off too eagerly before discussing much (and the lack of a plan mode doesn't help), but I think we just learn how to use them. These days, anything I don't like goes into the AGENTS.md, where I tweak the instructions until the model understands well.

Codex has a plan mode.

In the web interface press the "+" button next to the repo it is working on. Not obvious at all though!

Sorry, I meant Codex CLI. It doesn't help that OpenAI has at least three things called Codex...

I too feel the eagerness, sometimes I only ask questions, it starts to code right away, and I have to add do not write any code very explicitly.

I thought I liked Codex better, because the quality of the output is just higher, but after a week of trying I found I couldn't deal with talking to a robot. I'd rather have fun with junior Claude than with the stoic, socially-inept senior Codex.

I think codex is probably most impressive if you literally have no idea - and don't want to know - what you're doing at all.

> . I have ZERO experience with frontend,

After all these years, maybe even decades, of seeing your blog posts and projects on here, surely you must have had more experience with frontend than ZERO since you first appeared here? :)

Haha, fair, I meant "with React"!

He does have the experience... and stop calling me Shirley.

I really loved using Claude. I like working with Claude more than GPT or Gemini. Claude is to LLMs what Firefox is to browsers. I just like Firefox more than Chrome. It's very clearly behind GPT Codex at this point though. So far I've found Gemini for front-end design work to be better than the others, and I pair it with GPT for everything else. Hopefully Gemini 3 is a solid improvement, I like having at least two LLMs at high quality to run against each other.

Claude Code is much better than Codex CLI, but GPT 5 Codex is much better than Sonnet 4.5. I wish I could use one with the other, but alas.

There are tools like claude-code-router. I've gone through the pain of getting gpt-5, gemini-2.5-pro, and other models wired together. The system prompt differences are too much though I think, claude still feels the best in claude code.

I'm at the point where I have so much built up around claude code workflows that claude feels very good. But when I don't use them, I find that I immensely prefer gpt-5 (and for harder, design influencing questions, grok-4 heavy which is not available behind an API)

Yeah, I think the system prompts are so optimised for the specific model that others won't work as well, so it kind of defeats the purpose of being able to plug your own model in. I wish I could, but I know I won't get as good performance as with the model's native cli.

Also the models themselves are likely trained with the tools they'll likely have available in mind, and what harness they'll run in, and vice-versa.

It's noticeable when you setup some semi-fixed workflow against some model, and when you try to switch to a different family of models, the performance and accuracy notably change.

Yeah I was using Claude pretty continuously for 3, 4 months and then decided to give Codex a whirl and it was impressive. I'd consider it to be a lot more cautious and careful and less lazy?

It is however slow, and more expensive. You can either pay the $20 and get maybe 2 days of work out of it, or $200 for "Pro." But there's nothing inbetween like the $100 USD Claude Code tier.

Yeah, I'm really missing the $100 tier. The $20 gets me a day of coding a week with it, which is way too little, and $200/mo is too much for hobby projects.

I've personally been running the Claude Code tool but pointed at DeepSeek's API platform. Cheaper than both Anthropic and OpenAI, and about as good as Sonnet 4 was, I'm finding.

Context window is too small though, and it sometimes has problems with compacting. But I was having that with Sonnet 4.5 as well.

I kinda like what crush is doing: https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush

They're still lacking slash commands, sub agents etc (since they don't own their own model), but they do integrate language servers, which seems to be handy on larger codebases.

Crush + GLM-4.6 is one of the three I use regularly along with Claude and Codex

Oh this is pretty nice.. running it with deepseek now and so far pretty impressed.

Weird, I tried the CoPilot and Codex CLIs and my experience was not good. I set it up with the same MCP tools I use elsewhere and the results were subpar compared to using agents in IDEs. I don't think it's a context issue either.

I’m not sure about op but codex high is slow but really solid. Med is definitely more hit or miss. I think the “meta” is claude does straightforward “shoe tying” code better and codex does more complicated thinking stuff better. Especially high.

Tool use codex is trash compared to sonnet. So still not a one stop shop.

This summarizes it well. I wish Codex could learn to tooluse as well as Sonnet, would really unleash the deep thinking it's so good at.

my issue with codex is it will decide to take forever and do to much for one line changes I should've done myself, and sometimes would make more changes than desired. Claude Code is much more expedient and keeps its scope narrow and rarely goes outside the bounds of my request.

> sometimes would make more changes than desired

It's really easy to steer both Claude Code and Codex against that though, plop "Don't do any other changes than the ones requested" in the system prompt/AGENTS.md and they mostly do good with that.

I've tried the same with Gemini CLI and Gemini seems to mostly ignore the overall guidelines you setup for it, not sure why it's so much worse at that.

I agree with this, I've hit it too, plus I hit Codex limits in a day whereas I haven't hit a Claude limit yet, but all of this is more than compensated for by the simple fact that the code that Codex writes will almost always just work.

Sonnet is much less successful.

Codex attempts to one shot for me but there’s many rounds of refinement. I haven’t used it in the last couple of weeks because it’s disappointing. Over hyped. Gone back to Amp and a little bit of Cursor with Sonnet 4.5

This is my entire problem with Codex - it will spend ten minutes trying to one shot a problem and usually go off the rails at some point, whereas Claude seems much better at incrementally finding the right solution with me.

I've heard this from many people, but I really haven't had this experience. Sonnet will write code that doesn't work, but Codex will give me working code basically every time. It does take longer, and it does think a lot, but I've never seen it go off the rails.

I do look at the backend code it writes, and it seems moderately sane. Sometimes it overcomplicates things, which makes me think that there are a few dragons in the frontend (I haven't looked), but by and large it's been ok.

> (I haven't looked)

Oh.

> I do look at the backend code it writes, and it seems moderately sane

Not good enough for you?

It's just a different way of approaching the problem, and might partially explain the preference for Codex' style.

If I'm doing a large task, I use GPT 5 Pro to write a spec first (with advice for Codex, broken down task list, snippets etc). I may also supply entire files/repos as context for 5 Pro to produce this.

If I skip 5 Pro but still have a large task, I have Codex write a spec file to use as a task list and to review for completeness as it works.

This is how you can use Codex without a plan mode.

I still wish it would do all that on its own, without me having to switch models and make sure it won't make code changes.

Well, when you use GPT 5 Pro Mode it can't make any code changes, so not really a problem :)

I have similar workflow as parent, GPT 5 Pro for aiding with specifications and deep troubleshooting, rely on Codex to ground it in my actual code and project, and to execute the changes.

Codex won't read as much of your code as 5 Pro will (if you give it the context), and Codex will skip over reading in context that you give it (5 Pro can decide what's relevant after reading it all).

Yes Codex is still very early. We use it because it's the best model. The client experience will only get better from here. I noticed they onboarded a bunch of devs to the Codex project in GitHub around the time of 5's release.

> and Codex will skip over reading in context that you give it

That hasn't been my experience at all, neither first with the Codex UI since it was available to Pro users, nor since the CLI was available and I first started using that. GPT 5 Pro will (can, to be precise) only read what you give it, Codex goes out searching for what it needs, almost always.

That’s what I’m saying. Codex will search but then won’t read full files and is stingy with ingesting context. 5 Pro will take in a lot more context (quality up to about 60k input tokens) but you must give it. So sometimes you can even use Codex first to find what full files you should give to 5 Pro to create the spec/task list.

What my quote meant is that once you have the context Codex needs to do its work, if you give it to it, it’ll start the work right away without going and reading all those files again, which can help minimize context use within a Codex session (by having 5 Pro or just another Codex read in a lot of context to identify what is relevant for Codex instead of having Codex waste precious context headroom on discovery in a session that is dedicated to doing the work).

I've noted it elsewhere, but Codex has a plan mode.

On the web, press the "+" button next to the repo

I can’t use web because I do iOS dev

This matches my experience. Codex is just more capable. But Sonnet is also quite good and much faster.

So lately I'll start with Sonnet for everything but the most complex tasks and then switch to Codex when needed.

Claude's vscode extension and general ergonomics are vastly superior to Codex's. Codex has a comically inept UI, it literally can start lagging and has even crashed for me.

Any chance you could write up a blog post on your Codex experience(s)? Sounds really interesting.

I wrote a long comment but refreshed by accident before I could post it, so here we go again:

I'll write a post when I finish Pine Town, but I don't know what I could say about Codex in it. I think a big issue is that I don't know what others don't know, as the way I use LLMs (obviously) feels natural to me. Here are some tips that you may or may not already know:

* Reset the context as often as you can. LLMs like short contexts, so when you reach a point where the information has converged into something (e.g. the LLM has done a lot of work and you want it to change one of the details), reset the context, summarize what you want, and continue.

* Give the LLM small tasks that are logically coherent. Don't give it large, sprawling, open-ended tasks, but also don't give it chunks so tiny that it doesn't know what they're for.

* Explain the problem in detail, and don't dictate a solution. The LLM, like a person, needs to know why it's doing what it's doing, and maybe it can recommend better solutions.

* Ask it to challenge you. If you try to shoehorn the LLM too much, it might go off the rails trying to satisfy an impossible request. I've had a few times where it did crazy things because I didn't realize the thing I was asking for wasn't actually possible with the way the project was set up.

That's what I can think of off the top of my head, but maybe I'll write a general "how to work with LLMs" post. I don't think there's anything specifically different about Codex, and there must be a million such posts already, so I don't know if anyone will find value in the above... For me, it Just Worked™, but maybe that's just because I stumbled upon some specific technique that most people don't use.

Awesome! Looking forward to an in depth post once you get pinetown in order

> I wrote a long comment but refreshed by accident before I could post it...

So I was going to write a commiseration and a screed about what a colossal UI failure this is, that you can so easily lose such work. But FWIW, before posting I searched to see if there are any extensions to address this. There are several for Chrome, but on Firefox I ended up trying "Textarea Cache", and sure enough if you close the page, and reopen it later, you can click the icon to recover your words.

Thank you! I'll install that, though this was on mobile where extensions don't work because walled gardens :(

I am ride or die sonnet