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A week of using Codex more than Claude

allaboutcoding.ghinda.com

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Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not mentioning Grok 4.6 here is a crime. Fast and accurate. And it can communicate, unlike the gobbledygook that comes out of Claude.

[flagged]

Calling another person a monster because you disagree with them (or what you heard about them from third parties) is not the pinnacle of civility. Just think about what you’re saying here. Monster: “Malformed animal or human, creature afflicted with a birth defect”. You don’t mean this literally, do you? You may want to spend a moment to think about what kind of company you’re putting yourself in with such wording and such thinking.

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#83

>> 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:/…

you hear things like this about every model. they're probabilistic and you can't trust them, although i doubt that kind of odd behavior would happen on low or medium effort levels. i find all of the models today pretty good at following instructions generally speaking. i'm sure you did /plan, but i rarely see it stray very far from the plan. Then again, I never walk away, since i'm always spinning up another task that can be done in parallel, and I don't let things run overnight because I'm not made of token cash (yet)

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#84
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…

Not mentioning Grok 4.6 here is a crime. Fast and accurate. And it can communicate, unlike the gobbledygook that comes out of Claude.

As a coda to this, anyone using grok 4.6 via API pricing should be aware that while their headline pricing is good, the pricing that actually matters is pretty bad.

Their cache read costs are $0.50 per million, or 25% of the cost of uncached reads.

The industry standard is a 90% discount, so cache costs you 10% of uncached. So that means 5.6 Sol actually costs less per million cache reads - $0.40/million.

If you are doing a lot of agentic work where the vast bulk of your token consumption will be cached input reads, you won't get the expected cost savings from Grok.

I imagine this is the result of some problem in their serving infrastructure that I hope they will fix, because then the pricing will become actually strong. (The other possibility is that they bet on distracting people with good headline prices assuming they'd miss the bad cache pricing, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that.)

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#85
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.

Overall I prefer Codex over Claude in their current state, but I do agree that Codex's solutions tend to be too complex and I have to constantly tell it to simplify solutions, detect when it's creating ornate architecture, and proposing data models that have way too much going on. In my usage that's its main weakness.

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#86
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Calling another person a monster because you disagree with them (or what you heard about them from third parties) is not the pinnacle of civility. Just think about what you’re saying here. Monster: “Malformed animal or human, creature afflicted with a birth defect”. You don’t mean this literally, do you? You may want to spend a moment to think about what kind of company you’re putting yourself in with such wording an…

The person you are replying to maybe should have better referred to him as having “no moral compass”, which I believe is quite accurate.

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#87
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.

It's likely not helpful to you, but it is to Claude. Basically a memory entry at the exact point of relevance, with the same caveats. One advantage though is it survives cloning, so another using the project benefits.

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#88

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.

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.

> useless, noisy and confusing

That's your perspective. For Claude that's an extension of its thinking, which makes it work better. Just like the person who takes notes so they have references for later. Take it away and you're negatively impacting outcomes.

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#89
post #20

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.

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.

Looking into git history is an active decision that's usually only done after something undesirable happens, and now there's the need to try and find why. Better to have the context passively loaded as part of working with the relevant section of the code, and likely prevent that something from even happening in the first place. Think Chesterton Fence.

Re: A week of using Codex more than Claude

#90
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think harness/model pairs matter more than your analysis lets on. I've had great luck with the ds flash v4, paired with prime-agent for the harness--I like the results a lot. And you get to see thinking tokens. I haven't liked the model as much in opencode. Sol & luna have been great everywhere. sol plans, luna builds.

Prime Agent looks really interesting. Both the "recursive language model" bit and routing everything through IPython. https://github.com/PrimeIntellect-ai/prime-agent

It may be ipython making it work well with ds flash, too. I haven't really run many separate experiments, to be honest.

I also like prime-agent's way of handling sessions better than any other harness i've used. You can run multiple agents from one instance, although the scoping could be better.

But they can interact with past sessions, so preserving context isn't as important all the time. I just tell them to search for [thing] in another session.

It seems to have no problem with all the skills and things the other harnesses are using. I use superpowers and ponytail a lot.

It's my daily driver now. I like it better than opencode. But it doesn't ask permission. So I put it in a VM.

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