A Week of Using Codex More Than Claude: Quick Impressions
Quick impressions: A week of using Codex more than Claude
After a week of using OpenAI's Codex more than Anthropic's Claude, a developer shares personal observations. Key takeaways: Codex produces cleaner, more minimal code with fewer comments, but Claude excels at understanding intent and handling complex branching. Codex feels more like a technical tool, while Claude is more like a collaborative colleague. The author also notes differences in plugin support, debugging comfort, and MCP integration, concluding that Claude goes above and beyond while Codex does exactly what's asked.
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.
- 217
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 […]
- mewse-hn
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.
- agentdev001
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?"
- corytheboyd
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)
- stillpointlab
> 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.
- Kovah
> 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?
- ukuina
Which models? It is not useful to compare harnesses without this information.
- piazz
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.