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No, I assure you you are not being spammed because legitimately many people prefer codex over claude right now. I am one of those people. And if you go on tech social media spaces you'll see many prominent well known devs in open source say the same. And of course others praise claude as well.

At my job we have enterprise access to both and I used claude for months before I got access to codex. Around the time gpt-5.3-codex came out and they improved its speed I was split around 50/50. Now I spend almost 100% of my time using Codex with GPT 5.4.

I still compare outputs with claude and codex relatively frequently and personally I find I always have better results with codex. But if you prefer claude thats totally acceptable.

Same. Codex is faster and more consistent in the last few weeks for me vs Claude Code. I also don’t hit limits anywhere near as frequently.

Same. I’ve lived in Claude Code since the beta release and last couple of weeks was horrible. I’ve been using codex for last couple of days and it’s much smarter than 4.6.

Could you share what projects you are working on? (tech stack and size)

I am mostly working on small to medium sized Next.js and Kotlin projects and Claude works really well, while Codex often misunderstood my instructions, while I was testing it.

Well, I can share my experience from a few days ago. Gave the same task (a major refactor) to both Claude and Codex.

Codex finished in 5 minutes, Claude was still spinning after 20 minutes. Also it used up all my usage, about twice over (the 5-hour window rolled over in the middle of the task, so the usage for one task added up to 192%). Codex usage was 9%. So, 21x difference there, lol

They're saying there's bugs lately with how usage is being measured, but usage being buggy isn't exactly more encouraging...

So I was on task #4 with Codex while Claude was still spinning on #1.

I didn't like the results Codex gave me though. It has the habit of doing "technically what you asked, but not what a normal human would have wanted."

So given "Claude is great but I can't actually use it much" and "Codex is cheap and fast but kinda sucks", the current optimum seems to be having Claude write detailed specs and delegate to Codex. (OpenAI isn't banning people for using 3rd party orchestration, so this would actually be a thing you could do without problems. Not the reverse though.)

> Claude was still spinning after 20 minutes.

I have been using Claude Code on a medium codebase (~2000 files, ~1M lines of code) for over a year and have never had to wait this long. Also I'm on the max plan and have not seen these limits at all.

Just chipping in to say that I've never seen it churn for more than 20 minutes in two years worth of usage. The longest I've ever seen it churn is when I had it give extremely detailed analysis of five fictional novels simultaneously.

Fictional novels? Did it have to write them first?

No, I wrote them myself (training my wetware to write more as I get older).

I was using claude to create a codex of characters/lore/etc. I also had it auto-build a website promoting the books.

Love to see it if you're up for sharing

Just yesterday it thought for 591 seconds for me, which is ten minutes. There have been times this week when it ran longer and I assumed it was just bust and stopped it

I don't know, I think java is the best programming language. I use it for everything I do, no other programming language comes close. Python lost all my trust with how slow it's interpreter is, you can't use it for anything.

^^^^ Sarcastic response, but engineers have always loved their holy wars, LLM flavor is no different.

Java is great and all but if you don't use it with the right kind of keyboard you're wasting your time.

I use one of those very loud clacky ones with brightly colored keys and that makes me a better person

Joke's on you, I use Java as Clojure with a clacky split keyboard, feels great.

Oh yeah? Well my clacky split keyboard has red lights in it. That means I type faster because science says red light improves bloodflow.

GPT 5.4 xhigh thinking was really good at teasing out problems in multi step flows of a process I was refactoring, caught higher level/deeper problems than Opus 4.6. However getting it to write the code is just not a good experience for me, it changes the style/does not follow surrounding code, codes in a sloppy way and creates subtle bugs that I don't see from Opus. So I use codex for review and opus to write code. Testing the new Opus 4.7 still to see if the review/reasoning catches more/better stuff. I frequently fire off all 3 (Gemini 3.1 pro, Opus, Codex xhigh) on same code than have them cross reference each other and stuff like that. Gemini is so bad it's not even funny, not sure why I keep it running.

OAI marketing/PR in overdrive:

1. Subsidize compute unsustainably

2. Trick a bunch of people into thinking you're more pro-developer than the other guy [we are here]

3. Rug pull when you have enough market share.

Are you sure you selected GPT 5.4-xhigh as model, in Codex? Because this makes a huge difference, and with this setting in my experience Codex outperforms Opus for almost every coding/reasoning task. Opus is still better often times when there is to call a lot of tools, interact with servers to do operations and alike, but not always. But for low level coding, Codex with GPT 5.4-xhigh is really powerful.

I use both. I avoided codex in late 2025 because it was slow as molasses. I tried it again in February and it was on par with Opus speed.

I like codex(gpt-5.4 high) more for its ability to nitpick my PRs and find bugs. I like opus 4.6 much better for anything dealing with visuals, but I feel its rule adherence is inferior and it is not nearly as thorough on code reviews.

I like working and building better with claude, I like fixing bugs better with codex. Also, claude is much better and faster evolving with skills, plugins, new features I find useful, etc. Codex is always a month behind or more.

I did both for a month at higher tiers, $200 Claude Max and $200 ChatGPT Pro. I was always having to conserve my usage with claude, with codex I could just let it run wild with no cares. In the end, I downgraded claude to the $20 plan and use it on occasion, and I have kept the $200 codex sub.

I also have Claude at work, so I'll know pretty soon if I want to swap subs again, but for now, I'm sticking with codex at home.

> I tried it again in February and it was on par with Opus speed.

I'm not finding that, like not even close. I'm using it mostly to write specs and docs and having Claude and Gippity check each other's work and fix things. It's looking into other previously written MD docs, and checking against 3-4 multi-thousand file Ruby codebase(s).

5.4 takes about 50% longer, almost without fail. I'm using 'medium' effort on both.

Might be a difference in use cases. Mostly working in repos under 100k LOC, most of those are under 30k. Primarily golang, python, and terraform. Also a lot of interactive troubleshooting of Kubernetes, GHA, hardware debugging and application debugging.

I also only run in fast mode on gpt-5.4 high.

i think you are being needlessly paranoid here

openai doest offer affiliate marketing links

the reason you see lot of users switching to codex is for the dismal weekly usage you get from claude

what users care about is actual weekly usage , they dont care a model is a few points smarter , let us use the damn thing for actual work

only codex pro really offers that

we arent bots because we disagree with you. I switch between codex and opus, they have their differing strengths. As many people have mentioned, opus in the past few weeks has had less than stellar results. Generally I find opus would rather stub something and do it the faster way than to do a more complete job, although its much better at front end. I've had times where I've thrown the same problem at opus 4/5 times without success and codex gets it first shot. Just my experience.

I actually did the same pilot for a couple of days, while I don't like codex reply, it tackled some problems that claude were spinning for 20 minutes in 5 minutes. Now I have them side by side for codex to review claude's plan and it always find something that claude missed. The reply and the format though is not as good as claude. Pros and cons really, there are many cases where claude weren't able to debug prod issues like codex did as well for me

one thing to keep in mind is that you have to use GPT-5.4 differently from codex. they "work" in different ways. i was aghast when i noticed how terrible Codex was against Claude Code only to conclude it was me who wasn't using it right a couple days later

Opus 4.6 and 4.7 are better than GPT-5.4 xhigh, but only marginally. I can't give proper pointers on what to change because it's incredibly hard to quantify.

In essence, though, GPT-5.4 needs explicit instructions not to take liberties - this is included in the default system prompt of Claude Code which leads me to think Opus is just as overzealous as GPT-5.4 unless explicitly told off.

And it takes EVERYTHING you say at face value. Questions like "don't you see why this is bad?" will be answered with "yeah, i do." which is also kind of cool...

because with Opus in Claude Code i constantly have to reassure the model i'm not insinuating anything, lest it takes my question and runs with it into a frenzy of "oh shit my bad let me fix it im so sorry" type changes.

Personally, this is not my experience (and i'm sure others have also had very good results using Codex and this isn't some astroturf campaign).

The way i'd frame it is that both models have areas they excel at. i've had very good results with having Claude write implementation plans and initial investigations and letting Codex do the work of implementation.

I switched to Codex. What I noticed is that while Claude was a more elegant coder and more accurate in how it went about coding, Codex is more intelligent... hard to describe it. If I could have a subscription to both, I'd use Opus to plan and code, and then check the work and fix issues with Codex.

I’m slowly switching to codex simply because Claude code is closed source and I want to hack on my harness.

I noticed the same thing. Every Claude release thread is full of comments saying that it's terrible and why they switched to Codex. And vice versa for Codex release threads. At least its not as bad as /r/localllama that is 90% bots now.

I use both but I find even the way the model writes in codex to be harder to read. The usage limits in Codex were very generous the past year until this week.

On at least high effort level I find GPT 5.4 easily beats Opus 4.6 in code generation and debugging issues.

I use and pay for both. Currently I use 4.6 (well as of yesterday) to do broad strokes creation. I use codex for audit. Generally first two or three audit cycles claude completes. There is often a subtlety that only codex can fix, but I usually do that at the end.

IME, codex is sort of somehow more .. literal? And I find it tangents off on building new stuff in a way that often misses the point. By comparison claude is more casual and still, years later, prone to just roughing stuff in with a note "skip for now", including entire subsystems.

I think a lot of this has to do with use cases, size of project, etc. I'd probably trust codex more to extend/enhance/refactor a segment of an existing high quality codebase than I would claude. But like I said for new projects, I spend less time being grumpy using claude as the round one.

>> are we being spammed? great. annoying.

Yeah, very. Every single time this happens here, where there's a thread about an Anthropic model and people spam the comments with how Codex is better, I go and try it by giving the exact same prompt to Codex and Opus and comparing the output. And every single time the result is the same: Opus crushes it and Codex really struggles.

I feel like people like me are being gaslit at this point.

this is exactly how the other side feels

HN is literally full of contradictory stories when it comes to which model is better. It's impossible to know if one is objectively better than another, I suspect they're more or less equivalent. People who just recently had a particularly good experience will post that the model they used is better than the other ones. People who just recently had a particularly bad experience will say the model "got worse"...

It's all based on vibes!

I originally switched to Opus because it could reliably write Rust. As of 2 weeks ago, I'm using Codex because it writes way more compact and idiomatic Rust. Just another anecdote for the pile. I detest ChatGPT's persona, but Codex definitely feels better than Claude Code for anything I throw at it

codex astroturfing is even bigger on Reddit.

Yeah it's weird, almost like we're seeing two cults form in real-time.

I imagine there's a benign explanation too - the intelligence of these models is very spiky and I have found tasks were one model was hilariously better than the other within the same codebase. People are also more vocal when they have something to complain about.

In my general experience, Opus is more well-rounded, is an excellent debugger in complex / unfamiliar codebases. And Codex is an excellent coder.