I'll give GPT 5.3 codex a real try I think
But if people really like Codex better, maybe I’ll try it. I’ve been trying not to pay for 2 subscriptions at once but it might be worth a test.
Anecdotally, maybe this is the reason? It does seem to spend a lot more time “thinking” before giving what feels like equivalent results, most of the time.
Probably eats into the gambling-style adrenaline cycles.
Opus 4.6 wrote me a working macos application.
Codex wrote me a html + css mockup of a macos application that didn't even look like a macos application at all.
Opus 4.5 was fine, but I feel that 4.6 is more often on the money on its implementations than 4.5 was. It is just slower.
Opus went off and browsed my dependencies for ten minutes, and came back and solved the problem firs try.
I generally don't like the way codex approaches coding itself so I just feed its review comments back in to Claude Code and off we go.
In my experience, two different models together works much better than one, that's why this subscription banning is distressing. I won't be able to use a tool that can use both models.
And there's a good reason the most "famous" vibe coders, including the OpenClaw creator all moved to Codex, it's just better.
Claude writes a lot more code to do anything, tons of redundent code, repeated code etc. Codex is only model I've seen which occasionally removes more code than it writes.