In my personal experience the GPT models have always been significantly better than the Claude models for agentic coding, I’m baffled why people think Claude has the edge on programming.
Not throwing shade anyone's way. I actually do prefer Claude for webdev (even if it does cringe things like generate custom CSS on every page) -- because I hate webdev and Claude designs are always better looking.
But the meat of my code is backend and "hard" and for that Codex is always better, not even a competition. In that domain, I want accuracy and not speed.
Solution, use both as needed!
This is the way. People are unfortunately starting to divide themselves into camps on this — it’s human nature we’re tribal - but we should try to avoid turning this into a Yankees Redsox.
Both companies are producing incredible models and I’m glad they have strengths because if you use them both where appropriate it means you have more coverage for important work.
Ah and let me guess all your frontends look like cookie cutter versions of this: https://openclaw.dog/
(I'm also a "small steps under guidance" user rather than a "fire and forget" user, so maybe that plays into it too).
It's a very nice UX for iteratively creating a spec that I can refine.
Opus is the first model I can trust to just do things, and do them right, at least small things. For larger/more complex things I have to keep either model on extremely short leashes. But the difference is enough that I canceled my GPT Pro sub so I could switch to Claude. Maybe 5.3 will change things, but I also cannot continue to ethically support Sam Altman's business.
All that said, the single biggest reason why I use Codex a lot more is because the $200 plan for it is so much more generous. With Claude, I very quickly burn through the quota and then have to wait for several days or else buy more credit. With Codex, running in High reasoning mode as standard with occasional use of XHigh to write specs or debug gnarly issues, and having agents run almost around the clock in the background, I have hit the limit exactly once so far.