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Comment by karmasimida | Hacker News Reader

> With Codex (5.3), the framing is an interactive collaborator: you steer it mid-execution, stay in the loop, course-correct as it works.

> With Opus 4.6, the emphasis is the opposite: a more autonomous, agentic, thoughtful system that plans deeply, runs longer, and asks less of the human.

Ain't the UX is the exact opposite? Codex thinks much longer before gives you back the answer.

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I've also had the exact opposite experience with tone. Claude Code wants to build with me, and Codex wants to go off on its own for a while before returning with opinions.

Its likely that both are steering towards the middle from their current relative extremes and converging to nearly the same place.

also my experience in using these two models. they are trying to recover from oversteer perhaps.

well with the recent delays i can easily find claude code going off on it's own for 20 minutes and have no idea what it's going to come back with. but one time it overflowed it's context on a simple question, and then used up the rest of my session window. in a way a lot of ai assistants have ime have this awkward thing where they complicate something in a non-visible and think about it for a long time burning up context before coming up with a summary based upon some misconception.

The key is a well defined task with strong guardrails. You can add these to your agents file over time or you can probably just find someone's online to copy the basics from. Any time you find it doing something you didn't expect or don't like, add guardrails to prevent that in future. Claude hooks are also useful here, along with the hookify plugin to create them for you based on the current conversation.

I have started using openspec for this. I find it works far better to have a proposal and a list of tasks the ai stays more focused.

https://openspec.dev/

For complex tasks I ask ChatGPT or Grok to define context then I take it to Claude for accurate execution. I also created a complete pipeline to use locally and enrich with skills, agents, RAG, profiles. It is slower but very good. There is no magic, the richer the context window the more precise and contained the execution.

Same here, CC gives me options to pick direction after the planning stage.

In terms of 'tone', I have been very impressed with Qwen-code-next over the last 2 days, especially as I have it running locally on a single modest 4090.

Did you set that up following a guide or anything you could share?

not OP, but I got it running on my 4090 (and RAM) by following this guide: https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3-coder-next

I see around 30 t/s

Easiest way I know is to just use LMStudio. Just download and press play :). Optional, but recommended, increase the context length to 262144 if you have the DRAM available. It will definitely get slower as your interaction prolongs, but (at least for me) still tolerable speed.

Yes, you’re right for 4.5 and 5.2. Hence they’re focusing on improving the opposite thing and thus are actually converging.

Codex now lets you tell the LLM tgings in the middle of its thinking without interrupting it, so you can read the thinking traces and tell it to change course if it's going off track.

That just seems like a UI difference. I've always interrupted claude code added a comment and it's continued without much issue. Otherwise if you just type the message is queued for next. There's no real reason to prefer one over the other except it sounds like codex can't queue messages?

The problem is if you're using subagents, the only way to interject is often to press escape multiple times which kills all the running subagents. All I wanted to do was add a minor steering guideline.

This might be better with the new teams feature.

That is so annoying too because it basically throws away all the work the subagent did.

Another thing that annoys me is the subagents never output durable findings unless you explicitly tell their parent to prompt the subagent to “write their output to a file for later reuse” (or something like that anyway)

I have no idea how but there needs to be ways to backtrack on context while somehow also maintaining the “future context”…

They actually made a change a few weeks ago that made subagents more steerable

When they ask approval for a tool call, press down til the selector is on "No" and press tab, then you can add any extra instructions

Codex can queue messages, but the queue only gets flushed once the agent is done with whatever it was working on, whereas Claude will read messages and adjust accordingly in the middle of whatever it is doing. It sounds like OP is saying that Codex can now do this latter bit as well.

This is most likely an inference serving problem in terms of capacity and latency given that Opus X and the latest GPT models available in the API have always responded quickly and slowly, respectively

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