Feels like with every announcement there’s the same comment: “this LLM tool I’m using now is the real deal, the thing I was using previously and spending stupid amounts of money on looked good but failed at XYZ, this new thing is where it’s at”. Rinse and repeat.

Which means it wasn’t true any of the previous times, so why would it be true this time? It feels like an endless loop of the “friendship ended” meme with AI companies.

https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-is-the-frien...

It’s much more likely commenters are still in the honeymoon hype phase and (again) haven’t found the problems because they’re hyper focused on what the new thing is good at that the previous one wasn’t, ignoring the other flaws. I see that a lot with human relationships as well, where people latch on to new partners because they obviously don’t have the big problem that was a strain on the previous relationship. But eventually something else arises. Rinse and repeat.

I find Codex CLI to be very good too, but it’s missing tons of features that I use in Claude Code daily that keep me from switching full time.

- Good bash command permission system

- Rollbacks coupled with conversation and code

- Easy switching between approval modes (Claude had a keybind that makes this easy)

- Ability to send messages while it’s working (Codex just queues them up for after it’s done, Claude injects them into the current task)

- Codex is very frustrating when I have to keep allowing it to run the same commands over and over, Claude this works well when I approve it to run a command for the session

- Agents (these are very useful for controlling context)

- A real plan mode (crucial)

- Skills (these are basically just lazy loaded context and are amazing)

- The sandboxing in codex is so confusing, commands fail all the time because they try to log to some system directory or use internet access which is blocked by default and hard to figure out

- Codex prefers python snippets to bash commands which is very hard to permission and audit

When Codex gets to feature parity, I’ll seriously look at switching, but until then it’s just a really good model wrapped in an okay harness

When you say Claude Code, what model do you refer to? CC with Opus still outperforms Codex (gpt-5-codex) for me for anything I do (Rust, computer graphics-related).

However, Anthropic restricted Opus use for Max plan users 10 days or so ago severly (12-fold from 40h/week down to 5h week) [1].

Sonnet is a vastly inferioir model for my use cases (but still frequently writes better Rust code than Codex). So now I use Codex for planning and Sonnet for writing the code. However, I usually need about 3--5 loops with Codex reviewing, Sonnet fixing, rinse & repeat.

Before I could use one-shot Opus and review myself directly, and do one polish run following my review (also via Opus). That was possible from June--mid October but no more.

[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8449

I totally agree. I remember the June magic as well - almost overnight my abilities and throughput were profoundly increased, I had many weeks of late nights in awe and wonder trying things that were beyond my ability to implement technically but within the bounds of my conceptual understanding.

Initially, I found Codex CLI with GPT-5 to be a substitute for Claude Code - now GPT-5 Codex materially surpasses it in my line of work, with a huge asterisk. I work in a niche industry, and Codex has generally poor domain understanding of many of the critical attributes and concepts. Claude happens to have better background knowledge for my tasks, so I've found that Sonnet 4.5 with Claude Code generally does a better job at scaffolding any given new feature. Then, I call in Codex to implement actual functionality since Codex does not have the "You're absolutely right" and mocked/placeholder implementation issues of CC, and just generally writes clean, maintainable, well-planned code. It's the first time I've ever really felt the whole "it's as good as a senior engineer" hype - I think, in most cases, GPT5-Codex finally is as good as a senior engineer for my specific use case.

I think Codex is a generally better product with better pricing, typically 40-50% cheaper for about the same level of daily usage for me compared to CC. I agree that it will take a genuinely novel and material advancement to dethrone Codex now. I think the next frontier for coding agents is speed. I would use CC over Codex if it was 2x or 3x as fast, even at the same quality level. Otherwise, Codex will remain my workhorse.

Im not saying this is a paid endorsement but the internet is dead and I wonder what openAI would pay, if they could, to get such a glowing review as top comment on HN

I agree with this and actually Claude Code agrees with it too. I've had Codex cli (gpt-5-codex high) and claude code 4.5 sonnet (and sometimes opus 4.1) do the same lengthier task with the same prompt in cloned folders about 10x now and then I ask them to review the work in the other folder and determine who did the best job.

100% of the time Codex has done a far better job according to both Codex and Claude Code when reviewing. Meeting all the requirements where Claude would leave things out, do them lazily or badly and lose track overall.

Codex high just feels much smarter and more capable than Claude currently and even though it's quite a bit slower, it's work that I don't have to go over again and again to get it to the standards I want.

I haven't been able to get anything done with Codex. Claude Code is fast and "gets it". Also does better at running and testing its own stuff.

Its very odd because I was hoping they were very on par.

My experience is that if I know what I want, CC will produce better code, given I specify it correctly. The planning mode is great for this too, as we can "brainstorm" and what I have seen help a lot is if I ask questions about why it did a certain way. Often it'll figure out on its own why that's wrong, but sometimes it requires a bit of course correction.

On the other hand, last time I tried GPT-5 from Cursor, it was so disappointing. It kept getting confused while we were iterating on a plan, and I had to explain to it multiple times that it's thinking about the problem the same way. After a while I gave up, opened a new chat and gave it my own summary of the conversation (with the wrong parts removed) and then it worked fine. Maybe my initial prompt was vague, but it continually seemed to forget course corrections in that chat.

I mostly tend to use them more to save me from typing, rather than asking it to design things. Occasionally we do a more open ended discussion, but those have great variance. It seems to do better with such discussions online than within the coding tool (I've bounced maths/implementation ideas off of while writing shaders on a personal project)

Can you share an example of the tasks you found Codex being much better? From my experience Claude Code is much better.

Yeah this has been my experience as well. The Claude Code UI is still so much better, and the permissioning policy system is much better. Though I'm working on closing that gap by writing a custom policy https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-rs/execpolic...

Kinda sick of Codex asking for approval to run tests for each test instance

> We were heavy users of Claude Code ($70K+ spend per year)

Claude code has only been generally available since May last year (a year and half ago)... I'm surprised by the process that you are implying; within a year and a half, you both spent 70k on claude code, and knew enough about it and its competition to switch away from it? I dont think I'd be able to due diligence even if LLM evaluation was my fulltime job. Let alone the fact that the capabilities of each provider are changing dramatically every few weeks.

Yeah, after correcting it several times I've gotten Claude Code to tell me it didn't have the expertise to work in one of my problem domains. It was kinda surprising but also kinda refreshing that it knew when to give up. For better or worse I haven't noticed similar things with Codex.

Still a toss-up for me which one I use. For deep work Codex (codex-high) is the clear winner, but when you need to knock out something small Claude Code (sonnet) is a workhorse.

Also CC tool usage is so much better! Many, many times I’ve seen Codex writing a python script to edit a file which seems to bypass the diff view so you don’t really know what’s going on.

How did you spend $70k per year for a tool that's not a single year old?

On the topic of comparing OpenAI models with Anthropocene models, I have a hybrid approach that seems really nice.

I set up an MCP tool to use gpt-5 with high reasoning with Claude Code (like tools with "personas" like architect, security reviewer, etc), and I feel that it SIGNIFICANTLY amplifies the performance of Claude alone. I don't see other people using LLMs as tools in these environments, and it's making me wonder if I'm either missing something or somehow ahead of the curve.

Basically instead of "do x (with details)" I say "ask the architect tool for how you should implement X" and it gets into this back and forth that's more productive because it's forcing some "introspection" on the plan.

I did the opposite I switched to Claude code once the released the new model last week of the one before, I tried using codex, but there was issues with the terminal and prompting (multiple characters getting deleted) I found Claude code to have more features and less bugs, like the edit on vim for the prompt being really useful and find it better to iterate. Also I like more its tool usage and the use of the shell. Sometimes codex prefer to use python instead of doing the equivalent shell command. Maybe it's like the other people say here, that codex it's better for long running tasks, I prefer to give Claude small tasks and I'm usually satisfied with the result and I like to work alongside the agent

Interesting, I find codex CLI is really bad, like the worst coding agent I've tried.

Fails to escalate permissions, gets derailed, loves changing too many things everywhere.

GPT5 is good, but codex is not.

Claude Code is still good but I don’t TRUST it. With Claude Code and Sonnet I’m expecting failure. I can get things done but there’s an administrative overhead of futzing around with markdown files, defensive commit hooks and unit tests to keep it on rails while managing the context panic. Codex CLI with gpt-5-codex high reasoning is next gen. I’m sure Sonnet 5 will match it soon. At that point I think a lot of the workflows people use in Claude Code will be obsolete and the sycophancy will disappear.

I haven’t used Codex a lot, but GPT-5 is just a bit smarter in agent mode than Claude 4.5. The most challenging thing I’ve used it for is for code review and GPT-5 somewhat regularly found intricate bugs that Claude missed. However, Claude seemed to be better at following directions exactly vs GPT-5 which requires a lot more precision.

What is your general use case with Claude Code / Codex? $70K/year is a significant spend.

Same!

What model are you using respectively? Not sure I share your observations

Similar feeling. Seems it is good at certain things and if something doesnt work it want to do things simply and in turn becomes something that you didnt ask for and certain times opposite of what you wanted. On the other hand with codex certain time you feel the AGI but that is like 2 out of 10 sessions. This is primarily may be due to how complete the prompt and how well you define the problems.

Do you find this to still be true with the Sonnet 4.5 model?

My experience is similar, but for me, Claude Code is still better when designing or developing a frontend page from scratch. I have seen that Codex follows instructions a bit too literally, and the result can feel a little cold.

CC on the other hand feels more creative and has mostly given better UI.

Of course, once the page is ready, I switch to Codex to build further.

As we all know here, if the the title of this post was about Codex on the web, the top comment would have been about using Claude instead.

YMMV, but this definitely doesn't track with everything I've been seeing and hearing, which is that Codex is inferior to Claude on almost every measure.

Does no one use Blocks Goose CLI anymore? I went to a hackathon in SF at the beginning of the year and it seemed like 90% of the groups used Goose to do something in their Agent project. I get that the CLI agent scene has exploded since then I just wonder what what is so much better in the competition?

Totally agree. I was just thinking that I wouldn't want this feature for Claude Code but for Codex right now it would be great! I can simply let tasks run in Codex and I know it's going to eventually do what I want. Where as with Claude Code I feel like I have to watch it like a hawk and interrupt it when it goes off the rails.

What are the usage limits for Codex compared to Claude Code?

This is such an interesting perspective because I feel codex is hugely impressive but falls apart on any even remotely difficult task and is too autonomous and not eager enough.

Claude feels like a better fit for an experienced engineer. He's a positive, eager little fellow.

I'm just happy alternatives exist.

> I've seen Claude Code literally just give up on a hard problem and tell me to buy something off the shelf

I've been seeing more of this lately despite initial excellent results. Not sure what's going on, but the value is certainly dropping for me. I'll have to check out codex. CLI integration is critical for me at this point. For me it is the only thing that actually helps realize the benefits of LLM models we have today. My last NixOS install was completely managed by Claude Code and it worked very well. This was the result of my latest frustrations:

https://i.imgur.com/C4nykhA.png

Though I know the statement it made isn't "true". I've had much better luck pursuing other implementation paths with CC in the same space. I could have prompted around this and should have reset the context much earlier but I was drunk "coding" at that point and drove it into a corner.

do you use the CLI or the web UI? or both?

is is that better tho????

I thought claude code is still better in tool calling and something like that

This is going to be situation normal for 10 years: everyone will need to keep track of "model-du-jour" as each vendor makes incremental improvements.

This is why Anthropic is a zombie company.

They put all of their eggs in the coding basket, with the rest of their mission couched as "effective altruism," or "safetyism," or "solving alignment," (all terms they are more loudly attempting to distance themselves from[0], because it's venture kryptonite).

Meanwhile, all OpenAI had to do was point their training cannon at it for a run, and suddenly Anthropic is irrelevant. OpenAI's focus as a consumer company (and growing as a tool company) is a safe, venture-backable bet.

Frontier AI doesn't feel like a zero-sum game, but for now, if you're betting on AI at all, you can really only bet on OpenAI, like Tesla being a proxy for the entire EV industry.

[0] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/53Gc35vDLK2u5nBxP/...

It’s interesting because I’ve slowly arrived at the opposite conclusion: for much of my practical day to day work, using CC with “allow edits” turned OFF results in a much better end product. I can correct it inline, I pseudo-review the code as it’s produced, etc etc. Codex is better for “fire and forget” features for sure. But Claude remains excellent at grokking intent for problems where you aren’t quite sure what you want to build yet or are highly opinionated. Mostly due to the fact it’s faster and the iteration loop is faster.

> it's worth investing a lot of resources in sandboxing.

I tend to agree. There’s an opportunity to make it easy to have Claude be able to test out workflows/software within Debian, RPM, Windows, etc… container and VM sandboxes. This could be helpful for users that want to release code on multiple platforms and help their own training and testing, which they seem to be heavily invested in given all the “How Am I doing?” prompts we’re getting.

Do you have a practical sense of the level of mischief possible in the sandbox? It seems like a game of regexp whack-a-mole to me, which seems like a predictable recipe for decades of security problems. Allow- and deny-lists for files and domains seem about as secure as backslash-escaping user input before passing it to the shell.

Link to the GitHub for the native sandboxing: https://github.com/anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime

Nice its in the app, trying it out, seems damn buggy at the moment.

Exfiltration is always going to be possible, the question is, is it difficult enough for an attacker to succeed against the defenses I've put in place. The problem is, I really want to share, and help protect others, but if I write it up somewhere anybody can read, it's gonna end up in the training data.

> PRs are a bad way to review and iterate on code

idk, we’ve (humans) gotten this far with them. I don’t think they are the right tool for AI generated code and coding agents though, and that these circles are being forced to fit into those squares. imho it’s time for an AI-native git or something.

Right, that is closer to what I was hoping this announcement would be. I really just want a (mobile/web) companion to whatever CLI environment I have Claude Code running in. That would perfectly fill in the exact niche missing in my local dev server VM setup I remote into with any combination of SSH, VS Code Remote, or via Web (VS Code Tunnel from vscode.dev and a ttyd remote CLI session in the browser).

It would be great to be able to check in on Claude on a walk or something to make sure it hasn't gone off the rails or send it a quick "LGTM" to keep moving down a large PLAN.md file without being tethered to a keyboard and monitor. I can SSH from my phone but the CLI ergonomics are ... not great with an on screen keyboard, when all it really needs is just needs a simple threaded chat UI.

I've seen a couple Github projects and "Happy Coder" on a Show HN which I haven't got around to setting up yet which seem in the ballpark of what I want, but a first party integration would always be cool.

I agree and I also think the problem is deeper than that. It's about not being able to do most code testing and debugging remotely. You can't really test anything remotely really... Its in an ephemeral container without any of your data, just your repo. You can't have the model do npm run dev and browse to see the webpage, click around, etc. You can't compile or run anything heavy, you can't persist data across sessions/days, etc.

I like the idea of background agents running in the cloud but it has to be a more persistent environment. It also has to run on a GUI so it can develop web applications or run the programs we are developing, and run them properly with the GUI and requiring clicking around, typing things etc. Computer use, is what we need. But that would probably be too expensive to serve to the masses with the current models

Agree, each agent creating a PR and then coordinating merges is a pain.

I’d like

- agent to consolidate simple non-conflicting PRs

- faster previews and CI tests (Render currently)

- detect and suggest solutions for merge conflicts

Codex web doesn’t update the PR which is also something to change, maybe a setting, but for web Code agents (?) I’d like the PR once opened to stay open

Also PRs need an overhaul in general. I create lots of speculative agents, if I like the solution I merge, leading to lots of PRs

I just run the agent directly on separate testing/dev servers via remote-ssh in VS Code to have an IDE to sanity check stuff. Just far simpler than local dev and other nonsense.

Yes but pointy-haired bosses are much more amenable to the sales pitch of, "insert story, receive PR"

Have you checked out Ona [1] (gitpod's pivot)?

[1] https://ona.com/

so the biggest issue is having to pull down and manually edit changes? can't you just @claude on the PR to make any changes?

Hey, Kanjun from Imbue here! This is exactly why we built Sculptor (https://imbue.com/sculptor), a desktop UI for Claude Code.

Each agent has its own isolated container. With Pairing Mode, you can sync the agent's code and git state directly into your local Cursor/any IDE so you can instantly validate its work. The sync is bidirectional so your local changes flow back to the agent in realtime.

Happy to answer any questions - I think you'll really like the tight feedback loop :)

I think it’s a lot less exhausting now that the IDE part is mostly decoupled. I can’t imagine cursor continuing to compete when really all they’re doing is selling tokens either a markup, and hence crushing your context on every call. Sorry if that sounds negative but it’s true.

I use CC and codex somewhat interchangeably, but I have to agree with the comments. Codex is a compete monster, and there really isn’t any competition right now.

OpenAI seems to limit how "hard" your gpt-5-codex can think depending on your subscription plan; whereas Anthropic/Claude only limits how much use you get. I evaluate Codex every month or so with a problem suited to it, but rarely gets merged over a version produced by Charlie (which yes is $500/mo, but rarely causes problems) or something Claude did in a managed or unmanaged session. ymmv

In the modern age of mass credential stuffing attacks exploiting password reuse, MFA is one of the most effective tools for reducing unauthorized logins. Companies that don't adopt it are risking unacceptably high levels of credit card chargebacks.

I wish the standard were for companies to check new passwords against leaked password lists, e.g. what https://haveibeenpwned.com uses.

I use a similar workflow and have found that websites that allow passkey-based login can avoid the friction of waiting for TOTP codes or magic links.

How about using supporting WebAuthn?

The current claude.ai signin mechanism is rather annoying.

This seems to be the only solution still if using bedrock or direct API access instead of Pro / Max plan, the Claude Code for Web doesn't seem to let you use it that way.

It is not easy to support multiple providers at each layer of our tech stack but if we do not then a few players become easier to pick and then they monopolize.

I am trying to stay vendor neutral with my own coding agent (1). To approach this, I created a desktop app that connects to coding agent running on either my own infra or yours (local or your cloud server). Desktop app and coding agent are separate binaries.

If you host on your own infra then you can bring your own AI provider too. Similarly, I want to give choice for git host. Right now I am targetting GitHub but I want to add Gitlab soon after MVP. All this has made the path to my MVP longer but I see a clear long-term aim for myself - we should have choices.

1. https://github.com/brainless/nocodo

Our title generation is done preemptively as you type and is a bit too eager to declare it has enough context. We’ll tweak it.

This looks nice! I’ve been using terminus + tailscale to get similar results, but I’ll give this a go

Soon —> https://xkcd.com/2044/

This may explain it: https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/06/iphone-users-spend-apps/

Not unusual; most high profile apps ship on iOS first, going back to Instagram [1], which was released October 10, 2010. Instagram shipped their Android version 1.5 years later.

[1]: https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/Instagram

It is basically a US centric view of mobile OS market share.

It’s much harder dealing with all the complexities of different devices, screen sizes, OS versions.

https://www.reddit.com/r/applesucks/comments/1k6m2fi/why_do_...

Anthropic and Apple have a strategic partnership. It's a bit dicey but still seems to be in play. Which is interesting considering Google is a major investor and Apple is not. Anthropic wants Apple as a paying customer. Apple wants them to bend the knee.

Android is a tiny market

I haven't seen anyone talking about using agents in this way. I wonder if it would be helpful for learning e.g. a new language or codebase to have the human write the code while the agent takes the role of the "backseat driver" in the pair programming dynamic.

The person driving is the one that learns the most in pair programming. In the scenario you've described, that would be Claude. LLMs don't learn.

Doesn't CC sometimes take twenty, thirty minutes to return an attempt? I wouldn't know, because I'm not rich and my employer has decided CC is too expensive, but I wonder what you would do with your pair programming partner while you wait.

The bosses would like to think we'd start working on something else, maybe start up a different Claude instance, but can you really change contexts and back before the first one is done? You AND your partner?

Nah, just go play air hockey until your boss realizes Claude is what they need, not you.

Anecdotally, as a Max user typically using Claude Code for >8 hours/day, I've never experienced that. That said, I'm not one of those people using Opus for everything, and in fact I've been happy using Sonnet 4.5 even for planning.

I suspect the release of Claude Haiku 4.5 was done to help reduce usage costs for Anthropic and any use of Claude Code will differ to it if capacity is limited.

EDIT: I had meant defer which is the first time I've made a /r/boneappletea in awhile

Why?

You can ask Claude to install Postgres and it should just work. We'll have it. In the default image shortly.

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/tutorials/use-containeriz...

Check out Crystal if you want a good tool for managing parallel sessions locally https://github.com/stravu/crystal

Use pglite

ask your boss to read between the lines of this blog post:

https://developer.microsoft.com/blog/azure-devops-with-githu...

(if they want employee to use more AI, ditch ADO, embrace GitHub)

which specific functions/features of the browser control MCP do you lean on the most?

Yea it failed on testcontainers for me. The pnpm install worked fine though.

It's running Claude Code CLI on a container for you, so skills should just work. I've not tried them myself yet though.

It’s currently only available to max and pro users. It will be available to enterprise and teams users soon!

You can specify * as the url whitelist. We’ll have a drop down for it shortly.

Because Claude is 20 bucks a month, Codex is 20 bucks a month, and any pay by token plan is way more expensive.

Not sure what your twitter comment is about, I use it and I’ve just never heard of this product. Looks cool, I will give it a test.

I continue to believe that making developers 2-3x times more productive makes those developers 2-3x more valuable, and the smart thing for companies to do is to take on 2-3x times the amount of work, or hire MORE developers and finally start crunching through their inevitably years-long backlogs.

Thanks for the suggestion! We’re working on making this smoother.

You're using the metered API rather than a subscription, right?

are you using the web ui, cli or both?

not sure why you got downvoted but adding all these bells and whistles are the way to increase the price, which in turn justify the huge investment.

without 200% price increase in 3 years, there's no way any of these AI companies will survive.

Your comment has a bit of the "old man screams at clouds" feel to it.