It helps a lot that Claude is just better. Codex isn't BAD, and in some narrow technical ways might even be more capable, but I find Claude to be hands-down the best collaborator of all the AI models and it has never been close.
Interesting to hear! I've had completely opposite experience, with Claude having 5 minutes of peerless lucidity, followed by panicking, existential crisis, attempts to sabotage it's own tests and code, psyops targeted at making user doubt their computer, OS, memory... Plus it prompts every 15 seconds, with alternative being YOLO.
Meanwhile codex is ... boring. It keeps chugging on, asking for "please proceed" once in a while. No drama. Which is in complete contrast with ChatGPT the chatbot, that is a completely unusable, arrogant, unhelpful, and confrontational. How they made both from the same loaf I dunno.
I wish I could get Claude to stop every 15 seconds. There's a persistent bug in the state machine that causes it to miss esc/stop/ctrl-f and continue spending tokens when there's a long running background task or subagent. There's a lot of wasted tokens when it runs for 10, 15, 20 minutes and I can't stop it from running down the wrong rabbit hole.
The following is a dramatic reenactment of an observed behaviour /discl.
You are making tool X. It currently processes test dataset in 15 seconds. You ask claude code to implement some change. It modifies code, compiles, runs the test - the tool sits in a 100% CPU busyloop. Possible reactions on being told there is a busy loop:
"the program is processing large amount of data. This is normal operation. I will wait until it finishes. [sets wait timeout in 30 minutes]."
"this is certainly the result of using zig toolchain, musl libc malloc has known performance issues. Let me instead continue working on the plan."
"[checks env] There are performance issues when running in a virtual machine. This is a known problem."
"[kills the program]. Let me check if the issue existed previously. [git stash/checkout/build/run/stash pop]. Previous version did not have the issue. Maybe user has changed something in the code."
Bonus episode: since claude code "search" gadget is buggy, LLM often gets empty search results.
"The changes are gone! Maybe user delete the code? Let me restore last commited version [git checkout]. The function is still missing! Must be an issue with the system git. Let me read the repository directly."
(Unrelated but I'm really curious) The above comment got downvoted within few seconds of me pressing "reply". Is there some advanced hackernews reader software that allows such immediate reaction (via some in-notification controls)? Or is that builtin site reaction? Or a sign of a bot? Because the speed was uncanny.
There's this bug in Claude Desktop where a response will disappear on you. When you're busy doing many things at once, you'll go back to the chat, and you'll be all "wait, didn't I already do this?" It's maddening and makes you question your own sanity.
I switched from ChatGPT Plus to Gemini Pro instead of Claude, since I'm a hobbyist and appreciate having more than just text chat and coding assist with my subscription (image gen, video gen, etc are all nice to have).
At first I found the Gemini Code Assist to be absolutely terrible, bordering on unusable. It would mess up parameter order for function calls in simple 200 line Python. But then I found out about the "model router" which is a layer on top which dynamically routes requests between the flash and pro model. Disabling it and always using the pro model did wonders for my results.
There are however some pretty aggressive rate limits that reset every 24 hours. For me it's okay though. As a hobbyist I only use it about 2-3 hours per day at most anyway.
With Claude you just tell it to set up whatever it needs and you have a smooth access to everything. Mine uses Nanobanana for image generation, Sora for video, Gemini for supplementary image processing and so on. Setting up each one was 5-10 min of Claude’s work
With Gemini Pro on Antigravity you get a quota reset every 5 hours and access to Claude Opus 4.6. That's what I use at home and don't need anything else.
I've generally thought that but lately I've been finding that the main difference is Claude wants a lot more attention than codex (I only use the cli for either). codex isn't great at guessing what you want, but once you get used to its conversation style it's pretty good at just finishing things quietly and the main thing is context management seems to handle itself very well and I rarely even think about it in codex. To me they're just... different. Claude is a little easier to communicate with.
codex often speaks in very dense technical terms that I'm not familiar with and tends to use acronyms I've not encountered so there's a learning curve. It also often thinks I'm providing feedback when I'm just trying to understand what it just said. But it does give nice explanations once it understands that I'm just confused.
Can you expand on that. I've been wanting to try Claude for a while, but their payment processing wouldn't take any of my credit cards (they work everywhere else, so it's not the cards). I've heard I can work around this by installing their mobile app or something, but it was extra hurdles, so I didn't try very hard.
And I've been absolutely amazed with Codex. I started using that with version ChatGPT 5.3-Codex, and it was so much better than online ChatGPT 5.2, even sticking to single page apps which both can do. I don't have any way to measure the "smarts" for of the new 5.4, but it seems similar.
Anyways, I'll try to get Claude running if it's better in some significant way. I'm happy enough the the Codex GUI on MacOS, but that's just one of several things that could be different between them.
Codex is not bad, I think it is still useful. But I find that it takes things far too literally, and is generally less collaborative. It is a bit like working with a robot that makes no effort to understand why a user is asking for something.
Claude, IMO, is much better at empathizing with me as a user: It asks better questions, tries harder to understand WHY I'm trying to do something, and is more likely to tell me if there's a better way.
Both have plenty of flaws. Codex might be better if you want to set it loose on a well-defined problem and let it churn overnight. But if you want a back-and-forth collaboration, I find Claude far better.
I've had a list of pet projects that I've been adding to for years. For those, I just say the broad strokes and tell it to do it's best. Codex has done a really good job for most of them, sometimes in one shot, and my list of experiments is emptying. Only one notable exception where it had no idea what I was after.
I also have my larger project, which I hope to actually keep and use it. Same thing though, it's really hard to explain what's going on, and it acts on bad assumptions.
So if Claude is better at that, then having two tools makes a lot of sense to me.
> I've been wanting to try Claude for a while, but their payment processing wouldn't take any of my credit cards (they work everywhere else, so it's not the cards). I've heard I can work around this by installing their mobile app or something, but it was extra hurdles, so I didn't try very hard.
Not Claude Code specifically, but you can try the Claude Opus and Sonnet 4.6 models for free using Google Antigravity.
Thank you for this. I had Antigravity already but was thinking of cancelling it because Gemini frustrates me. Using it with Claude though was very impressive. I burned through my token budget in about 5 hours though.
I’ve been juggling between ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini for the last couple of years, but ChatGPT has always been my main driver.
Recently did the full transition to Claude, the model is great, but what I really love is how they seem to have landed on a clear path for their GUI/ecosystem. The cowork feature fits my workflows really well and connecting enterprise apps, skills and plugins works really well.
Haven’t been this excited about AI since GPT 4o launched.
