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Comment by xscott | Hacker News Reader

Can you expand on that. I've been wanting to try Claude for a while, but their payment processing wouldn't take any of my credit cards (they work everywhere else, so it's not the cards). I've heard I can work around this by installing their mobile app or something, but it was extra hurdles, so I didn't try very hard.

And I've been absolutely amazed with Codex. I started using that with version ChatGPT 5.3-Codex, and it was so much better than online ChatGPT 5.2, even sticking to single page apps which both can do. I don't have any way to measure the "smarts" for of the new 5.4, but it seems similar.

Anyways, I'll try to get Claude running if it's better in some significant way. I'm happy enough the the Codex GUI on MacOS, but that's just one of several things that could be different between them.

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Codex is not bad, I think it is still useful. But I find that it takes things far too literally, and is generally less collaborative. It is a bit like working with a robot that makes no effort to understand why a user is asking for something.

Claude, IMO, is much better at empathizing with me as a user: It asks better questions, tries harder to understand WHY I'm trying to do something, and is more likely to tell me if there's a better way.

Both have plenty of flaws. Codex might be better if you want to set it loose on a well-defined problem and let it churn overnight. But if you want a back-and-forth collaboration, I find Claude far better.

That is interesting, and thank you.

I've had a list of pet projects that I've been adding to for years. For those, I just say the broad strokes and tell it to do it's best. Codex has done a really good job for most of them, sometimes in one shot, and my list of experiments is emptying. Only one notable exception where it had no idea what I was after.

I also have my larger project, which I hope to actually keep and use it. Same thing though, it's really hard to explain what's going on, and it acts on bad assumptions.

So if Claude is better at that, then having two tools makes a lot of sense to me.

> I've been wanting to try Claude for a while, but their payment processing wouldn't take any of my credit cards (they work everywhere else, so it's not the cards). I've heard I can work around this by installing their mobile app or something, but it was extra hurdles, so I didn't try very hard.

Not Claude Code specifically, but you can try the Claude Opus and Sonnet 4.6 models for free using Google Antigravity.

Thank you for this. I had Antigravity already but was thinking of cancelling it because Gemini frustrates me. Using it with Claude though was very impressive. I burned through my token budget in about 5 hours though.

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