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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

#21
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?

I found that Claude would litter the codebase with what felt like notes-to-self. Sometimes it would make an abstraction that wasn't very well thought out and when I pushed back on this choice, it would usually go with something more along the lines of what I suggested in my pushback, but left a comment like "use the git CLI instead of re-implementing git" or something.

It felt like it was commenting on the diff sometimes instead of what the code was doing.

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#22
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"don't write a goddamn novel" <- I've said this to claude way too many times, nothing you can do actually seems to make it significantly less verbose

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#24
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.

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#25
> 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?

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#26
post #4
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.

Yeah, Claude insists on prompt-affirming comments, and often refers to the previous draft or implementation instead of the status quo.

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#28
post #10

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 cla…

the future is here and one should be thankful for its slightly uneven distribution. otherwise we would hardly have anything left about which to develop strong opinions!

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#29
post #25

> 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?

I have the same experience. I have passed Codex's code over to Claude (Sonnet mostly) to simplify it and it did a so much better job. Codex couldn't comprehend a simpler solution no matter what.

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#30
>> 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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