while everyone is somehow still stuck on and fascinated by claude, heres your quick update on the sota of coding models and harnesses mid august 2026

codex is good, both cli and desktop app, you get lots of usage on any plan. sol is good! and gets the job done, write or dictate a very long and thoughtful prompt, and leave sol xhigh or max fast working on it for an hour or so

omp is an amazing harness, any feature claude code or codex is adding has likely already been here for a couple months. good harness which im suggesting to all my developer friends, but for everyone else codex is the better option due to its simplicity and being the plug and play option

claude is decent, but not great. all models are somehow getting restrictive. you get basically unlimited opus on max plans, fable is good but slow and the random guardrails suck soo much which is why i havent used it once in weeks now.

gemini 3.7 is great for speed. everyone is sleeping on it, including even me

kimi k3 - great for frontend, one of the few models thats willing to commit crimes for you AND has the intelligence to have a chance at actually succeeding;

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

glm 5.3 i haven't tested yet

honorable mention to local models which are actually getting good now! 5090s will continue to get more and more expensive in the coming months. sadly.

theres way way more than claude in this world and its taking people surprisingly long to figure that out. maybe its for the best!

I only have the $20 claude subscription. Last weekend I was doing a fairly heavy task (porting quake to raspberry pi native GLES 1.0) and ran out of claude usage twice, then hooked in with Luna in OpenCode and finished everything off for like $0.40 in tokens, which was impressive.

With Opus 5.0 being kinda crappy vs 4.8, I think Anthropic is in trouble.

I’m sure it depends on the type of work, but for mine, Codex is much more helpful. Honestly, it mostly comes down to it being significantly faster, probably because as many have said, it seems tuned to not spit out word vomit, both in its chat interactions, and its code (Claude is obsessed with massive comment blocks that are basically guaranteed to become dead context noise if you ever use it to iterate on code).

I mostly do very obsessive, tightly scoped, carefully thought out small changes on a fairly boring stack, one interaction at a time, verifying functionality and code. I know what I am doing, but I also know what I don’t like doing (the same exact set of things I’ve already done a dozen times in my career)

Im trying to do my part in the world here.

This post needs an edit. Author is not comparing "Codex" and "Claude". They are comparing Codex TUI/CLI with (presumably) gpt-5.6-sol, against Claude Code TUI/CLI with (presumably) Claude-Opus-5.

Ctrl + f > [5.6, sol, sonnet, opus or fable] yields no results.

"Claude" is a product family, which includes Models, and Harnesses (and probably more). "Claude code" covers both the Claude Code TUI, and CC in the Claude desktop app.

"Codex" is the same, and could refer to the Codex TUI, or Codex in the ChatGPT (formerly codex) desktop app. (And well, historically, gpt-5.*-codex.)

Hearing "Yea Claude is great for coding" takes an hour off my life.

Something something "Honey why don't you finish up with your Nintendo and come to dinner?"

> Codex feels more like a version of Data from Star Trek

Great analogy for some reason. At fist I felt Codex Sol was a bit more cold. But now that I've worked with it for several weeks it has grown on me, even shown some personality. I appreciate that it is a bit more business-like, Fable is a bit too friendly sometimes when it ought to be focused on work. Codex can be a bit more nit-picky.

I agree with most of his other observations. I've already started to bin tasks based on which model I feel is best suited. In general, for well scoped and straight ahead tasks where banging out code is what I want I reach for Codex. For less specced tasks where I need a broader view and want the model to fill in more details I reach for Fable.

Both are great and they make a good team together.

> It felt to me that Codex created a much simpler solution in terms of code architecture than Claude.

Wow, I made exactly the opposite experience. Codex loves to make things as complicated as possible, even ignoring instructions and predefined skills. Claude behaves way more pragmatic. Maybe depends on the type of work one does, or even which programming languages/frameworks are used?

Which models? It is not useful to compare harnesses without this information.

Summer 2026 meta (well, mine):

Sol is for routine work, Opus for frontend/design, and Fable for more complex / ambiguous / architecture work. Fable works extremely well to drive Sol as a subagent.

Fable is the only one you can actually trust to not look at the code, but Sol is somehow still more pleasant to work with, especially in fast mode. Opus is the enemy, and it will make you insane if you talk to it for too long.

When discussing Claude vs. Codex, etc. I find it necessary to make the distinction between the models and the harness.

Claude's models in my experience do a better job of inferring my intent, or to say it does a better job of giving me the result I imagined in my mind. A recent example was a UI prototype I was building for a desktop application. I had asked GPT's 5.6 Sol to update the open document in the prototype to better reflect the context of the feature I was designing, and 5.6 Sol took it very literally and had just added some text to the currently open document, not what I had in mind. I tried again with Claude Opus 5 and it added a completely new tab with a complete new document that, although imperfect, much better matched my expectations.

You could say this was a prompting skill issue, but seeing how many people are prompting their AI I believe the labs are incentivized to continue to improve their ability to infer intent.

When it comes to the desktop applications though, I find Claude Desktop's output to be incredibly verbose and full of jargon. I feel like it hits me with an entire essay and the UI doesn't have enough typographic hierarchy to make it easy to scan. ChatGPT Desktop is much better in this regard, I feel the output is concise, clear, and gives me just enough info to feel in the loop without being overwhelmed. Even though I have the setting on for technical language, it feels more understandable than Claude. I also feel that ChatGPT's desktop app has a better design and much more polish.

I do not really like how bloated both applications have become though. This weird segmentation of Chat, Work, and Code all just seems like it's pushing a technical limitation onto the user. The other day I opened a document in ChatGPT and asked it to do something, then it told me it could only do it in work "mode", so it then created an entirely new conversation with a reference to the previous conversation. It wasn't a completely new area of the UI either, it just added a "Work" badge to the new conversation in the list. Feels a bit unnecessary, like couldn't you just keep it all within the same conversation?

For me, codex $100 mo/plan and a claude teams account at work (mostly sonnet, some opus), Claude basically feels about as effective as Codex did 4-5 months ago pre-5.6. Claude still has weird patterns of being confident in one answer while another chat with the same model is confident in another answer, where one answer is clearly wrong. Missed details, over-engineering in places, while still overall helpful and effective. Codex, however, just feels freaking rock solid on Sol high. I literally have zero complaints.

"How this article was written I wrote this article and used Grammarly to proofread and fix it."

What a brave new world we're in, where this is necessary. Regardless, it's appreciated. Although, I have the feeling that those using an LLM to do most of their writing will be less likely to include such a disclaimer.

I’ve been experimenting with this for a while, and right now I’m using Luna xhigh as my default. Previously I was using Sol medium.

Sol medium is a great balance between speed and being thorough, but it’s quite expensive. Luna xhigh seems to compensate for slightly lower intelligence by thinking and reasoning for longer, so tasks can take more time to complete. But it’s crazy cheap.

I also have some custom evals using promptfoo to make sure I’m not introducing regressions when switching models. So far, Luna xhigh has been really, really good for the price.

Don’t sleep on it. Give Luna a try.

> Changes created by Codex had fewer comments in Ruby/Ruby on Rails code. I liked that a lot, and I will soon share some experiments I ran on this.

Why is fewer comments a good thing?

I've been using Zed mostly with Codex session windows and its great. It is much easier to handle multiple sessions than in the Codex VSCode app and the interface is quite good.

I find Claude more often gets my intent without having to spell things out for it, while Codex gets hung up on minor details and over-engineers a solution for them.

Kinda interesting reading people comment with completely contradictory anecdotal experience with the various models.

I did the same this week.

The speed is the first big contrast; I have a routine multi-step skill that I run several of per week. Opus 5 was routinely taking 2 hours to do it, while older Claude models took around 20 mins; Codex restored that speed.

Second is legibility. Somebody wrote in one of the related discussions yesterday that Claude's current linguistic contortions could legitimately be considered damaging to mental health, which doesn't seem (too) hyperbolic to me. Codex (Sol) isn't perfect but it's much more direct. And so far I haven't seen it display much of an attitude, vs Opus's infuriating passive aggressive sulky know it all personality.

I slightly prefer Anthropic to OpenAI as a company, but I will vote with my wallet and discontinue my max subscription unless Anthropic does some serious damage control within the next week or two.

Agree with most of these.

One thing I don’t love about codex/sol is I find it tends to overengineer and be overly cautious.

I was using it to do create some scraping + data processing.

It went kind of crazy on the provenance, need at least 3 sources of consensus before promoting facts type bullshit.

defined a bunch of enums and gates.

I just wanted scrape some site data and put it into a SQLite dB. Like chill codex.

I feel like Claude is better at that.

Claude is pretentious abrasive snob, codex is the blue collar guy that gets shit done in my experience.

I broadly agreed with the authors experience, although I wouldn't say codex does anything "wrong". I think different agents/LLM's have different personalities, and it takes learning to understand how to get them to do what you want. I had the same experience when we started using claude at work, and I was trained on codex. Claude seemed to do everything "wrong", because I was writing instructions designed for codex.

I do agree claude looks for more things to do in your repo, whereas codex is more likely to do what its old and stop. Which is better is personal preference as far as I can tell.

I honestly would've used Claude more if not for the confusing presentation/font, I'm not an expert on this subject, Codex is just a lot easier on my eyes.

Yes I have tried different settings already.

>> I think the main difference I feel between Claude and Codex is that Claude tries to go above and beyond what is asked and guess what you might want and then directly do it, while Codex is more like a companion that does what you tell it but will not overdo it. It will stop at the first sign that it might be done.

Damn, my experience is the complete opposite of this. I have posted about it a few times, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49348265

tl;dr I gave GPT 5.6 a small-medium sized ticket, which should have been several hundred lines plus tests. It ended up creating a 25,000+ line diff. Another GPT 5.6 Sol with fresh context looked at the worktree and said 98% of it should be thrown away. Claude thought the same, and suggested that several dozen compactions the model went through over several hours must have caused it to go adrift. I guess that's one consequence of having a relatively small context window.

I still use Sol quite a bit. I find that it's consistently the opposite of what the author describes: it's too relentless. It doesn't know when to stop. Opus is the opposite: it'll give up a bit too easily. If everything goes well that's not an issue, but often times it'll say things like "task is done, btw I couldn't do X Y Z" and X Y Z will be some important verification step that failed because another agent was using that resource or something.

At this point I trust GPT 5.6 mostly with surgical changes, or general codebase exploration tasks. It is a faster model, so it's easier to get small things done with it. For everything else I prefer Claude, despite its annoying tendencies.

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