A lot of (carefully hedged) pro Codex posts on HN read suspect to me. I've had mixed results with both CC and Codex and these kinds of glowing reviews have the air of marketing rather than substance.
For example, I have a ChatGPT and a Gemini subscription, and thus could somewhat quickly check out their products, and I have looked at a lot of the various Google AI dev ventures, but I have not yet found the energy/will to get more into Gemini CLI specifically. Antigravity with Gemini 3 pro did some really wonky stuff when I tried it.
I also have a Windsurf subscription, which allows me to look at any frontier model for coding (well, most of the time, unless there's some sort of company beef going). This I have often used to check out Anthropic models, with much less success than Codex with > GPT-5.1 – but of course, that's without using Clode Caude (which I subscribed to for a month, idk, 6 months ago, and seemed fine back then but not mind blowingly so).
Idk! Codex (mostly using the vscode extension) works really well for me right now, but I would assume this is simply true across the board: Everything has gotten so much better. If I had to put my finger on what feels best about codex right now, specifically: Least amount of oversights and mistakes when working on gnarly backend code, with the amount of steering I am willing to put into it, mostly working off of 3-4 paragraph prompts.
I do earnestly believe their models are currently the best to work with as software developers, but as I state in my post I think this is the state of the world today and have no premonition for that being true forever.
Same questions apply to Anthropic, Google, etc, etc — I'm not paid by anyone to say anything.
You can check my history to confirm I criticize sama far too much to be an OpenAI shill.
Because of that, everyone who is new to this will be focused on Codex and write their glowing reviews of the current state of AI tools in that context.
And as I mentioned here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46392900) I have no affiliation with any of the organizations, nor care to evangelize any of them. Nobody pays me to write, I’m just a guy on the internet sharing his thoughts, building software, and teaching people how to use AI better with any tool people want to use. :)