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My token usage on Claude models has dropped by 83% over the last month - I'm pretty much only using it for quick one off questions or reading papers. it feels impossible for me to get Opus models to stop entering into cyclic loops, and my work is too security adjacent for Fable.

Codex has been an excellent workhorse - doesn't feel like I have to dance around the guardrails, doesn't lose _everything_ when it compacts, and doesn't litter the workspace with a million and one planning to plan files.

I have to agree with you there. I did some good work with Claude then Fable came out - impressed with that as well. Then they dropped access to it and upon returning was never the same - even the Opus models for some reason. Then one day I burned through my limit in about 10 minutes and had to get a project completed. I subscribed to Codex and it has been fantastic - finished my project and continued on to others. I just dropped my Claude max plan down to the pro and subscribed to the $200 plan on Codex.

I don’t get Claude, and that’s almost exactly what I did - I dropped to Claude Pro $20 + Codex Pro $100, and then unsubscribed from Claude and ramped up Codex. The Claude Pro is consumed within an hour on a simple task. I wish only Codex worked a bit faster than on the Fast mode.

I used to rely on Fable for research when it was first out, today it doesn’t seem to be much better than Opus, and it uses up the quota exceptionally fast - 1h Fable in a single short session, and there’s little left for Opus to hit the 5h limit in a second session. With Opus I get about 3-5h of relaxed use with a couple subagents to save the context, but there’s usually quite some disagreement between the subagents and orchestrator - Claude does some model routing with default agents and picks Haiku and Sonnet for subtasks - only later to disagree with them and redo the work - and burn extra tokens. With Claude, it’s really either Opus or Fable if you want some quality.

That said, their marketing is exceptionally effective. Virtually all nontech folks consider only Claude.

It is wild to read stuff like this when it is OpenAI that is being blamed for rug-pulling users and secretly reducing limits. It's such a big mess that Codex's product lead has been frantically posting updates on Twitter about it.

my problem with claude currently is the language its using is dense and feels like its not even meant for humans. this guy is calling everything a spine, a seam, a gate, load bearing, any ui element is "chrome", it's actually absurd.

yeah there is that too. if everything else I stated wasn’t wrong I could put up with that. Codex on the other hand is great. Concise, technical, effective and non chatty. And that my friend is a load bearing comment.

Pi by itself is more than capable, OMP is okay but you really don't need much for a great harness (these models are RL trained to hell to be a coding agent, sometimes less is more)

I run a lot of SlopCodeBench - https://github.com/michaelasper/benchmarks

Fable/Sol/GLM 5.3/Kimi are its league (in that order) Deepseek/Opus is solid Qwen 27B is the floor - there's no reason to use Sonnet/Terra/Haiku

For everyday activity - I don't think you need to be using Sol (xhigh) for everything - unless you're made of money - I've found using Luna from OpenAI to be more than enough - it'll outreach to Opus/Sol when it needs to

Haven't had access to Gemini 3.7 but we're getting it at work soon, will give it a go!

Codex CLI is pretty bare bones in a bad way (at least Pi is extensible). Claude code is vibeslopped to the extreme

Using Sol XHigh or even High will deplete the Pro sub pretty fast in my experience if one is running any sort of automations in their harnesses. Sol-medium lets me squeek by with it using lesser subagents. Using ninfer on 5090 and 35BA3B qwen 3.6 is also kind of cool to get a local cerebras experience at 600 tk/, it does make errors so 27B is actually faster at the end at 140-150 tk/s. 35B is great though at digging through session logs and such at high speed.

> you really don't need much for a great harness (these models are RL trained to hell to be a coding agent, sometimes less is more)

To be precise, you need a while-loop, user input and bash.

It's about 50 lines of Python: https://minimal-agent.com/

I built my own agent based on this and use it every day.

I'm sad that Opus is now considered "solid" and not on par with Sol, since OpenAI supposedly has "Astra" which I thought would be comparable to Fable.

It was "amazing" back when I first tried 4.6, but that's just my rose-coloured glasses speaking, I guess. I think I was one of the first few to call out Opus 5 for being hot garbage.

I don’t get how Claude is considered providing “unlimited” quotas. I use up my 5h on Max $100 and Team Premium in 2-3h of relaxed use of Opus 5 high+ on fresh sessions with just a couple skills/plugins. And my weekly quotas are gone in 3 days of such relaxed use. With Codex my $100 weekly quota is used up within 3 days with Sol high+ too.

Im not convinced to pay $200 for Claude’s models.

With Claude, I have to intervene every 15-20 minutes, it’s non-autonomous and it’s incredibly unreliable at self-correction. GPT is strong at self-correction but it tends to drift away from the plan to self-correct in a loop very often - a lot of tokens and time burnt on aimless churn. Opus tends to push its uninformed opinions and fake retrieval, drifting every turn increasingly farther from the intended and approved design. Opus skims over specs and makes too many mistakes.

As for closed frontier models, I prefer the GPT models over Claude’s.

I’ve started relying more on Grok, GLM, Kimi and DeepSeek models for subagents - I’ve ended up with a factory and am seeking to reduce my reliance on the closed frontier models - they’re just not SoTA on their own for development anymore.

You may be causing a lot of cache misses. You have to use the caching efficiently otherwise you can burn up any plan in any amount of time.

How do you use the cache efficiently?

I'd start by disabling all plugins and MCPs. You'd be surprised how quickly those can annihilate usage and cache coherency

Unfortunately the codex plans don’t offer the same amount of tokens as they did before. This changed around a week ago. There’s been a lot of user reports noticing this issue, and I’ve noticed the same pattern on my account. Previously I would never reach my weekly quota but last week I managed to finish it it one day. Same project, same single session sequential work. Not sure if there’s an issue or if it’s on purpose, and not even sure it applied to all accounts. Curious if other users on HN noticed the same problem.

I think harness/model pairs matter more than your analysis lets on.

I've had great luck with the ds flash v4, paired with prime-agent for the harness--I like the results a lot. And you get to see thinking tokens.

I haven't liked the model as much in opencode.

Sol & luna have been great everywhere. sol plans, luna builds.

Prime Agent looks really interesting. Both the "recursive language model" bit and routing everything through IPython.

https://github.com/PrimeIntellect-ai/prime-agent

It may be ipython making it work well with ds flash, too. I haven't really run many separate experiments, to be honest.

I also like prime-agent's way of handling sessions better than any other harness i've used. You can run multiple agents from one instance, although the scoping could be better.

But they can interact with past sessions, so preserving context isn't as important all the time. I just tell them to search for [thing] in another session.

It seems to have no problem with all the skills and things the other harnesses are using. I use superpowers and ponytail a lot.

It's my daily driver now. I like it better than opencode. But it doesn't ask permission. So I put it in a VM.

> gemini 3.7 is great for speed

Does this mean it can break your code faster now, or have they actually worked on making it good? Every single time I've given Gemini a chance (in older point versions) it would almost immediately break something and throw itself into a loop. I have not experienced it being useful for programming and almost never heard an account of somebody else doing so.

Remember those stories of LLMs catastrophically deleting entire repositories or databases? It was always Gemini.

I'm amazed that you'd trust Gemini over DeepSeek, which I've had very good experiences with after some tuning, though still on a relatively short leash.

3.6+ have been fine for me. They still introduce bugs but at least they don’t make you wait an hour for them like Claude does.

I've been using all the SOTA models a lot at work, like serious amount of tokens. It's been really rare that I stick with one model and harness for too long... Except a month ago I started testing Kimi K3 and omp and I never went back.

Something with this combo works really well for Rust dev. The model doesn't really annoy me at all and I have not switched to Opus or SOL. And the monthly token bill is much lower...

Gemini 3.7 may have fast token output but holy cow does it waste it on useless output. Several times now I've given it a shot and watched it's reasoning trace go through a bunch of unnecessary / off-target steps relative to what I asked. Don't have this issue with 5.6 models. MAI Code 1.1 is also solid and fast for non-complex tasks.

OMP is great, testify.-

jcode is a very very peculiar harness, but has some out-of-the-box thinking built in (by the devs, thinking ...)

Crush is also very well put together, and, IIRC, can do "mid turn" interruption, so can be driven from the outside.-

> gemini 3.7 is great for speed. everyone is sleeping on it

Is this Gemini 3.7 Flash by any chance? Then - No. Not sleeping on it. It’s just not good.

I had a Python package build fail this week due to an unpinned dependency. Gave it to Gemini spent 5-7mins before I noticed it going off in some tangent. Reran with Claude Opus 4.8 - fixed in under a minute.

I know anecdata of one. But something like this has happened every time I test a new model from Google.

> ds pro and flash are fast but not something id actually use for important things, unlike sol, fable and maybe 3.7 here and there

As someone who's used Gemini 3.7 Flash (Google sub mostly for the storage) and DS4 Flash a lot (~6B tokens), I'd actually place DS4 Flash (even pre-0713) above Gemini 3.7 Flash. Gemini has a tendency to leave some things unimplemented; perhaps it's agy which frankly leaves a bit to be desired as a harness.

Although I will praise DS4 Flash any day, it no longer makes sense for me after the price increase (GPT 5.6 Luna is a much better price point) and I have completely migrated my high volume workflows to Muse Spark 1.2 Contributor (which I find to perform better than DS4 Flash 0713, happily).

> you get lots of usage on any plan.

I hit my weekly limit on $200/mo Codex plan in about ~2 days. :/ I'm not doing anything custom/crazy/special. A lot of 5.6 Sol Ultra though, I'll give you that.

> I'm not doing anything custom/crazy/special. A lot of 5.6 Sol Ultra though

If you're not doing anything special there is no reason to use the Ultra mode.

Ultra mode is for applying the maximum amount of tokens to a problem without regard to conserving any quota.

Max and Ultra are fantastic for the more complex problems where they shine. I use them strategically on certain classes of problems, one or the other depending how parallelizable it is.

I've found it consistently amazing at game dev. It sounds like something that would be difficult for an LLM to verify and iterate on properly, but it almost feels like having a mini-Carmack inside your computer once you try it out. You can throw it at broad, sweeping optimization passes, writing 5 different styles of eyesight sensor frameworks to see what works best in the game as it is, visual scripting integration problems/extensions, etc. with fantastic results.

Also found Ultra great for "get this local LLM working as fast as possible on this odd server setup with old GPUs and AMX support, writing custom kernels/modifications to llama.cpp/sglang/etc as you go while taking notes from relevant research papers and online posts"

Just use qwen3.8-27b on a Mac with oMLX, ANE enabled and skip cloud models.

the future is here and one should be thankful for its slightly uneven distribution. otherwise we would hardly have anything left about which to develop strong opinions!

Not mentioning Grok 4.6 here is a crime. Fast and accurate.

And it can communicate, unlike the gobbledygook that comes out of Claude.

> Not mentioning Grok 4.6 here is a crime.

Not yet. Don't give the guy ideas.

Been working a lot recently with Grok 4.6 for implementation and gpt 5.6 sol for review. Worked really good so far.

Why not the other way around?

I would not use Grok if it paid me per token… wild wild stuff…

As a coda to this, anyone using grok 4.6 via API pricing should be aware that while their headline pricing is good, the pricing that actually matters is pretty bad.

Their cache read costs are $0.50 per million, or 25% of the cost of uncached reads.

The industry standard is a 90% discount, so cache costs you 10% of uncached. So that means 5.6 Sol actually costs less per million cache reads - $0.40/million.

If you are doing a lot of agentic work where the vast bulk of your token consumption will be cached input reads, you won't get the expected cost savings from Grok.

I imagine this is the result of some problem in their serving infrastructure that I hope they will fix, because then the pricing will become actually strong. (The other possibility is that they bet on distracting people with good headline prices assuming they'd miss the bad cache pricing, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that.)

I agree that it's fast and accurate, but Grok 4.6 was released only 10 days ago so you can't blame someone for not trying it yet. (Versus many months at the frontier level for Claude and ChatGPT.)

Here's a quick review I just posted if anyone's interested:

https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/aug2026/grok-4-6-review/

Grok, is this true?

Elon burned too many bridges to warrant ever supporting anything he is associated with ever again.

Sure, you can let politics dominate everything you do. Or you can realize that SpaceX is a massive (public) company with thousands of employees, and millions of shareholders, all of whom have their own opinions and goals, just like any other corporation.

Competition is good. Excluding a leading player in the market because you don’t like Elon Musk is…something.

If politics isn’t a concern, why not just use deepseek?

I am trying all of them. At this time, for me, Grok hits the sweet spot of quality, speed, cost and ease of use.

I’m absolutely “hot money” when it comes to coding models. These things are commodities.

DeepSeek is much dumber at the moment. It's barely better than Qwen3.8 27B that you can run locally.

I run both (I have an max with 64GB if ram, so local models get used a lot) and DeepSeek is definitely smarter in my experience. But again, I have my own way of using it that works for me.

You know why

I’m more than happy to let SpaceX burn out over the next few years now that they’re public and their last quarter financials showed the emperor is without clothes (muh space datacenters).

Because ULA and the senate launch system is better?

SpaceX's valuation is as an AI company that happens to launch rockets on the side.

You can’t justify AI company valuations either.

Only one of those capabilities can actually deliver kinetic solutions. Meanwhile big tech revenue is delivering ad solutions.

> Sure, you can let politics dominate everything you do.

I assume they're referring to the recent discovery that Grok Build was uploading entire repositories to their servers in the background, include .env secrets that had been excluded

https://gist.github.com/cereblab/dc9a40bc26120f4540e4e09b75f...

That incident has put Grok on the no-fly list for a lot of people and companies

It was a bug, and was immediately corrected. The other harnesses have bugs too. You just don't know about them.

Frankly, the people who keep bringing this up are mostly engaged in motivated reasoning. I don't trust any company, and any product where I have to send my code to a third party to make it work is a devil's bargain. I don't trust any of the major labs, but it is what it is.

The only way forward is local models, but we're not there yet.

There's a difference between not trusting a company because it's a company driven to chase profit at the expense of everything else, versus the same thing but it's run by a literal nazi that uses his companies as leverage to undermine democracy and enrich himself.

Elon is not a literal Nazi.

Sure, way to young for that; but he is very much cut from the Nazi adjacent, racist, antisemitic, antidemocratic, technocratic views of his whole heartedly apartheid embracing grandfather Joshua N. Haldeman.

  His grandfather wrote his tracts to raise an alarm about what he called “mind control,” on the radio and television, where “an unconditional propaganda warfare is carried on against the White man.”

~ https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-world-accor...

So, your argument is that his grandfather wrote something, once, so therefore we can't use Grok? Is that about right?

Man, politics are a hell of a drug. Guilt-by-association tu quoque logic is just fine when it's someone you don't like.

People have bent themselves into some pretty amusing mental places over Musk.

Absolutely no point arguing with these people. They are so ideologically captured that it's pointless trying to discuss anything with them. Just move on. Everything and everyone they disagree with is "nazi" and if you say anything contrary to that you're a "nazi" also.

He does the same exact literal Nazi things that Nazi did and has Nazis in his family tree. You'll need better arguments to defend him than just "I don't agree".

He used their salute

Bizarre reply. It's not "dominating everything you do". It's one specific thing. Grok exists in a very crowded space and it's incredibly easy to not use it. If this is your reaction to someone taking a very easy stand on their personal principles, it does not reflect well on you.

"Bizarre" only in the sense that you're purposely trying not to understand.

Literally every commodity product is in a crowded space, and easily substituted. If it's a good product (Grok Build objectively is one of the very best in the space), it's a good product, and it's self-defeating to avoid it because you hate a guy for political reasons.

Just as it would be nonsensical to avoid shopping at WalMart, Target, or any of a million other places. Because I guarantee they're all associated with people you won't like.

On the contrary, I'm trying to understand as best I can. I find your position so completely devoid of any inkling of personal or social responsibility that it takes quite some empathy to muster up a reply that's not wildly uncivil.

I also think it's callous to brush away "political reasons" as though it's some trivial abstract thing. Or perhaps it comes from a place of nihilism?

I choose not to give my money to people I think are enormously evil. That's really all there is to it. I don't see why this is "nonsensical".

> I find your position so completely devoid of any inkling of personal or social responsibility that it takes quite some empathy to muster up a reply that's not wildly uncivil.

Oh stop. Other people believe different things than you. If you cannot see how using a coding agent is not "devoid of personal or social responsibility", then you really need to step away from the keyboard.

Using or not using a coding agent is not what I took issue with.

What I find devoid of responsibility is the argument you made originally--that making choices as a consumer informed by anything external to the direct value you're paying for is pointless/inexplicable/self-sabotaging/whatever.

Based on your reply, I'm not actually sure if you actually believe this, or if it's only a form of motivated reasoning because you have some positive feelings about Elon or whatever, and that we wouldn't be having this argument if the original commenter was boycotting some other product for some reason you agreed with.

> What I find devoid of responsibility is the argument you made originally--that making choices as a consumer informed by anything external to the direct value you're paying for is pointless/inexplicable/self-sabotaging/whatever.

That isn't what I wrote. There are tons of valid reasons to avoid a product, other than the "direct value you're paying for". I don't pay for lots of products because I don't like the past corporate behavior, for example. I'm disinclined to use a particular AI lab's products because they seem to be on a mission to scare the crap out of everyone, and usher in an AI regulatory state. I don't support that, so I don't use the product.

What I said was that it's spitting in the wind to do what you're doing, because it's based on personal dislike of a single man. You don't like Musk, for political reasons, and because of that you've ruled out a product line.

To date, SpaceX has done nothing that bothers me, other than have a bug that they fixed immediately. So I use the product. Musk's political associations are irrelevant to me.

Anyway, you do you. Hopefully you now understand my "bizarre take".

> Just as it would be nonsensical to avoid shopping at WalMart, Target, or any of a million other places. Because I guarantee they're all associated with people you won't like.

In a capitalist society voting with your wallet is one of the few powers consumers have to change corporate behavior.

Why would I give that up?

> Or you can realize that SpaceX is a massive (public) company with thousands of employees, and millions of shareholders, all of whom have their own opinions and goals, just like any other corporation.

Do you have ANY idea about the SpaceX corporate structure? Elon is basically SpaceX's Sun God and the other shareholders don't matter.

Plus SpaceX is incorporated in Texas where I'm fairly sure the legal system is arranged in such a way that it's supremely hard to contest anything in terms of corporate decisions.

As far as the average person cares, every SpaceX shareholder and employee is basically an Elon sharecropper and they matter less than Musk's toenails in terms of corporate decision making.

Just when I think this place is better than Reddit, here we are.

Any opinions (by anyone really) on how much I can trust Claude vs. Codex (vs. something else) to not leak my coding conversations or use them for training?

I have the appropriate privacy settings set up but wondering how much I can trust each company with them.

I’ve been using codex more recently, like others here.

But one thing I’ve noticed which I find a bit of a red flag: by default you only archive chats. If you go online, it says there’s a location in settings where can delete your archive. But it’s not that obvious where to find, and when I finally find some link, it was literally broken. It said it can’t find any archived chats, even though I archive them all the time.

Bit of a red flag for me. Both Anthropic and OpenAI claim that when you delete a chat, it’s gone after some retention period. They’re just words but if they’re secretly training on your traces and you delete your chats, then they would need to break two terms/conditions: ignoring your “train on my data” preference and ignoring your orders to delete chats. So it is an extra barrier.

But OpenAI, as far as I can tell, doesn’t let you delete your chats. Convenient then if they change their mind about training sometime in the future.

For individual use without specially negotiated Enterprise stuff I can't afford both offer contractual assurances of not using your data for training or ads and measurement and selling your data.

But these are not the same level of technical assurance you get from say, a zero data retention provider on OpenRouter.

Right now I am finding I have to tolerate substantial friction to use Hermes for personal stuff with a ZDR provider and ChatGPT and Codex for less personal stuff because the products and models are simply so much better.

Sorry, what does "everyone is sleeping on it" mean?

It is under-utilized and not getting the attention it deserves.

It's receiving less attention than it merits

Copilot and Devin. They're actually really good too.

Claude code seems like a beginner's trap at this point.

deepseek?