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A week of using Codex more than Claude

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Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#11

Post by aleksiy123 »

aleksiy123 wrote: post #7

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.…

As a follow up.

I feel like codex/sol is better at well scoped hard technical problem.

Where it can sort of run this brute force analytical loop.

Like doing performance optimization or other search type problems. I think the math proofs are good examples of this.

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#12

Post by aksss »

aleksiy123 wrote: post #7

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.…

What, you don't like it proposing sha256 checksums and state enums for everything?? :D It does seem to have this predilection, but I find it calms down if I tell it to simplify for "this phase". Sure, we'll pick that up down the road.. I promise. :D

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#13

Post by 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.

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#14

Post by o-o- »

muglug wrote: post #4
beering wrote: post #2

> 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?

Claude can add comments in code that are better just living as a comment on the PR. You'll ask it to do something and it'll comment the code with an answer to what you asked it, rather than just explanatory comments to whoever comes after. There's also a second issue that if the code is actually incorrect, the comment can nevertheless bolster the case for it.

> Claude can add comments in code that are better just living as a comment on the PR.

Not to Claude – its own, old comments have helped me/it solve new issues on more than one occasion.

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#15

Post by rplnt »

skeledrew wrote: post #8
rirze wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude is creating verbose comments with recent models and people are are tired of it

Those verbose comments provide context for why something is there way it is, so it can take those decisions in account when making changes in the future.

> why something is there way it is

It writes out stories describing what isn't there or what used to be there. It's usually not helpful, just noise. It also likes to write it in very verbose AI-styled prose.

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#16

Post by amdsn »

skeledrew wrote: post #8
rirze wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude is creating verbose comments with recent models and people are are tired of it

Those verbose comments provide context for why something is there way it is, so it can take those decisions in account when making changes in the future.

If they have in mind what I think of when I think of claude comments then frequently they are only relevant to the back and forth that produced the code and are exaggerated to the point of being misleading. A very common example is to land on something that isn't quite right or doesn't quite work, prompt an adjustment, and then the adjustment will have some grandiose prose about "preventing the critical bug that shipped once." People just need to clean up such litter manually but it would be nice if the models generated less of it.

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#17

Post by guywithahat »

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.

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#18

Post by jedberg »

muglug wrote: post #4
beering wrote: post #2

> 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?

Claude can add comments in code that are better just living as a comment on the PR. You'll ask it to do something and it'll comment the code with an answer to what you asked it, rather than just explanatory comments to whoever comes after. There's also a second issue that if the code is actually incorrect, the comment can nevertheless bolster the case for it.

Claude assumes humans won't look at code anymore. The comments are for the next Claude that comes in to change something.

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#19

Post by bryanlarsen »

skeledrew wrote: post #8
rirze wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude is creating verbose comments with recent models and people are are tired of it

Those verbose comments provide context for why something is there way it is, so it can take those decisions in account when making changes in the future.

Those massive comments generally refer to intermediate states that never shipped, making them utterly useless, noisy and confusing as a permanent artifact. They're sometimes useful to reviewers, so a commit message or pull request comment is much more appropriate.

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#20

Post by fpoling »

skeledrew wrote: post #8
rirze wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude is creating verbose comments with recent models and people are are tired of it

Those verbose comments provide context for why something is there way it is, so it can take those decisions in account when making changes in the future.

If one needs to dig history, then git log -p and similar are way more useful and reflect the real history rather than LLM inference about it. Comments reflecting the goal are more useful as neither history nor code itself covers it.
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