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Comment by enraged_camel | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure about that. Claude has some bugs, but Codex is not as polished and doesn't have as many features. For example, you need to add MCP servers manually. There's no Plugin/Skill/Connector marketplace that is accessible from within the app, like there is with Claude Desktop. The Cowork-equivalent is nowhere as powerful. And so on.

I still use Codex, but mostly when I need to check Opus 4.8's work. Pretty sure I will stop doing that soon, because during the short time Fable was available, Codex was not able to find any important issues with the code Fable wrote.

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But how many plugins are people actually using? I can think of one MCP server I find valuable (context7) and one plugin that i've installed, but continuously think about uninstalling (obra/superpowers).

Both were trivial to set up with codex.

It's a good thing. I hate MCPs from the bottom of my heart because they always stay there and bloat the context window. Also, usually developers who develop them don't know what they're doing, so the MCP responses also bloat your context even further.

There are plugins in the app.

Haven’t tried Cowork, interesting. Isn’t it just the same agent minus the git worktree based UI?

Frankly, neither Claude nor Codex are as good as hype entails.

i think codex is much better in that aspect. In claude there is skills, connector, capabilities and 4 places for browser... It is too much.

Personally I prefer GPT 5.5 writing style over Opus 4.8. It’s much more no nonsense and information denser.

That's the first time I saw someone prefering GPT-styled output over Claude ;) It's the complete opposite for me, GPT is way too verbose (even after telling it to STFU), overwhelms the user with thousands of options and doesn't just answer a question without shitting out thousands of paragraphs. Also the overall tone is way too enthusiastic.

Dunno, I prefer GPT 5.5 too for the same reasons as the parent. Extremely subjective but had better results with it too. Maybe I just got unlucky with Claude a few times, but even the latest Opus was dumb.

Fascinating how people have such complete diametrically opposed experiences. I guess both models have it in them to behave very differently in different circumstances and we have very little idea what pushes them in this or that direction. I guess it does boil down to luck!

Personally, Claude Opus (and in the few interactions I had with it, Fable) has been the far the superior experience. GPT-5.5 seems dumber and more certain about presenting me bullshit. Opus has better humor, and is less pretentious in its presentation. But this may all boil down to how the models react to my prompting.

What is without a doubt is that I wish they both were more intelligent – or maybe it is their wisdom I find lacking!

It might be harness or prompting style. Personally I use opencode and my prompting style is very plain and terse . Where tasks are very small. Opus and Sonet too often are too verbose and go tangent. Where GPT5.5 is much stricter.

I strongly prefer codex. Claude is annoying. Codex provides descriptions where I want them and more touchpoints to audit the quality of work. Claude code on experimental seems to not even show diffs when asked anymore, and it's much less clear what is being shipped.

> For example, you need to add MCP servers manually. There's no Plugin/Skill/Connector marketplace that is accessible from within the app

This is all wrong.

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