alt Hacker NewsIt has become very quickly unfashionable for people to say they like the Codex CLI. I still enjoy working with it and my only complaint is that its speed makes it unideal for pair coding.
On top of that, the Codex CLI team is responsive on github and it's clear that user complaints make their way to the team responsible for fine tuning these models.
I run bake offs on between all three models and GPT 5.2 generally has a higher success rate of implementing features, followed closely by Opus 4.5 and then Gemini 3, which has troubles with agentic coding. I'm interested to see how 5.2-codex behaves. I haven't been a fan of the codex models in general.
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I care very little about fashion, whether in clothes or in computers. I've always liked Anthropic products a bit more but Codex is excellent, if that's your jam more power to you.
Claude Code is just a better CLI:
- Planning mode. Codex is extremely frustrating. You have to constantly tell it not to edit when you talk to it, and even then it will sometimes just start working.
- Better terminal rendering (Codex seems to go for a "clean" look at the cost of clearly distinguished output)
- It prompts you for questions using menus
- Sub-agents don't pollute your context
the faddish nature of these tools fits the narrative of the METR findings that the tools slow you down while making you feel faster.
since nobody (other than that paper) has been trying to measure output, everything is based on feelings and fashion, like you say.
I'm still raw dogging my code. I'll start using these tools when someone can measure the increase in output. Leadership at work is beginning to claim they can, so maybe the writing is on the wall for me. They haven't shown their methodology for what they are measuring, just telling everyone they "can tell"
But until then, I can spot too many psychological biases inherent in their use to trust my own judgement, especially when the only real study done so far on this subject shows that our intuition lies about this.
And in the meantime, I've already lost time investigating reasonable looking open source projects that turned out to be 1) vibe coded and 2) fully non functional even in the most trivial use. I'm so sick of it. I need a new career
When Claude screws up a task I use Codex and vice versa. It helps a lot when I'm working on libraries that I've never touched before, especially iOS related.
(Also, I can't imagine who is blessed with so much spare tome that they would look down on an assistant that does decent work)