Codex has always been better at following agents.md and prompts more, but I would say in the last 3 months both Claude Code got worse (freestyling like we see here) and Codex got EVEN more strict. 80% of the time I ask Claude Code a question, it kinda assumes I am asking because I disagree with something it said, then acts on a supposition. I've resorted to append things like "THIS IS JUST A QUESTION. DO NOT EDIT COD…
This is not Claude Code.
And my experience is the opposite. For me Codex is not working at all to the point that it's not better than asking the chat bot in the browser.
I don't trust it completely but I still use it. Trust but verify. I've had some funny conversations -- Me:"Why did you choose to do X to solve the problem?" ... It:"Oh I should totally not have done that, I'll do Y instead". But it's far from being so unreliable that it's not useful.
I find that if I ask an LLM to explain what its reasoning was, it comes up with some post-hoc justification that has nothing to do with what it was actually thinking. Most likely token predictor, etc etc.
As far as I understand, any reasoning tokens for previous answers are generally not kept in the context for follow-up questions, so the model can't even really introspect on its previous chain of thought.
Codex has always been better at following agents.md and prompts more, but I would say in the last 3 months both Claude Code got worse (freestyling like we see here) and Codex got EVEN more strict. 80% of the time I ask Claude Code a question, it kinda assumes I am asking because I disagree with something it said, then acts on a supposition. I've resorted to append things like "THIS IS JUST A QUESTION. DO NOT EDIT COD…
> Codex, on the other hand, will follow something I said pages and pages ago, and because it has a much larger context window (at least with the setup I have here at work), it's just better at following orders. Can you speak more to that setup?
Claude Code goes through some internal systems that other tools (Cline / Codex / and I think Cursor) do not. Also we have different models for each. I don't know in practice what happens, but I found that Codex compacts conversations way less often. It might as well be somehow less tokens are used/added, then raw context window size. Sorry if I implied we have more context than whatever others have :)
Codex has always been better at following agents.md and prompts more, but I would say in the last 3 months both Claude Code got worse (freestyling like we see here) and Codex got EVEN more strict. 80% of the time I ask Claude Code a question, it kinda assumes I am asking because I disagree with something it said, then acts on a supposition. I've resorted to append things like "THIS IS JUST A QUESTION. DO NOT EDIT COD…
>I've resorted to append things like "THIS IS JUST A QUESTION. DO NOT EDIT CODE. DO NOT RUN COMMANDS". Which is ridiculous. Funny to read that, because for me it's not even new behavior. I have developed a tendency to add something like "(genuinely asking, do not take as a criticism)". I'm from a more confrontational culture, so I just assumed this was just corporate American tone framing criticism softly, and me com…
I've been using chat and copilot for many months but finally gave claude code a go, and I've been interested how it does seem to have a bit more of an attitude to it. Like copilot is just endlessly patient for every little nitpick and whim you have, but I feel like Claude is constantly like "okay I'm committing and pushing now.... oh, oh wait, you're blocking me. What is it you want this time bro?"
The whole idea of just sending "no" to an LLM without additional context is kind of silly. It's smart enough to know that if you just didn't want it to proceed, you would just not respond to it. The fact that you responded to it tells it that it should do something, and so it looks for additional context (for the build mode change) to decide what to do.
> It's smart enough to know that if you just didn't want it to proceed, you would just not respond to it. No it absolutely is not. It doesn't "know" anything when it's not responding to a prompt. It's not consciously sitting there waiting for you to reply.
I didn't mean to imply that it was. But when you reply to it, if you just say "no" then it's aware that you could've just not responded, and that normally you would never respond to it unless you were asking for something more.
It just doesn't make any sense to respond no in this situation, and so it confuses the LLM and so it looks for more context.
LLMs screw up far more than 1% of the time. They screw up routinely, far more than a professionally trained human would, and in ways that would have said human declared mentally ill.
Codex has always been better at following agents.md and prompts more, but I would say in the last 3 months both Claude Code got worse (freestyling like we see here) and Codex got EVEN more strict. 80% of the time I ask Claude Code a question, it kinda assumes I am asking because I disagree with something it said, then acts on a supposition. I've resorted to append things like "THIS IS JUST A QUESTION. DO NOT EDIT COD…
>I've resorted to append things like "THIS IS JUST A QUESTION. DO NOT EDIT CODE. DO NOT RUN COMMANDS". Which is ridiculous. Funny to read that, because for me it's not even new behavior. I have developed a tendency to add something like "(genuinely asking, do not take as a criticism)". I'm from a more confrontational culture, so I just assumed this was just corporate American tone framing criticism softly, and me com…
Same here. I quickly learned that if you merely ask questions about it's understanding or plans, it starts looking for alternatives because my questioning is interpreted as rejection or criticism, rather than just taking the question at face value. So I often (not always) have to caveat questions like that too. It's really been like that since before Claude Code or Codex even rolled around.
It's just strange because that's a very human behavior and although this learns from humans, it isn't, so it would be nice if it just acted more robotic in this sense.
To be fair to the agent... I think there is some behind the scenes prompting from claude code (or open code, whichever is being used here) for plan vs build mode, you can even see the agent reference that in its thought trace. Basically I think the system is saying "if in plan mode, continue planning and asking questions, when in build mode, start implementing the plan" and it looks to me(?) like the user switched fr…
Asking a yes/no question implies the ability to handle either choice.
Not when you're talking with humans, not really. Which is one of the reasons I got into computing in the first place, dangit!