alt Hacker News> Anyone seeing differently?
There have been a stream of HN posts (I'm noticed this mainly in the past few weeks) implying some people prefer ChatGPT/Codex to Claude.
Anecdotally, Claude on the $20/month plan can only run 1-3 queries per 4 hours before rate limiting, often stopping in the middle of a query. ChatGPT/Codex doesn't have this problem.
Replies
That's crazy talk. I am on the $20 plan and I do hit the limit occasionally, but I get a few hours of usage before I do.
> Anecdotally, Claude on the $20/month plan can only run 1-3 queries per 4 hours before rate limiting
Utterly not my experience. I use opus near daily for long research sessions (not all agent based). Are you throwing in 100k input tokens to every query?
What the hell kind of queries are you running? I use Claude Pro all the time for asking questions, doing data analysis, writing side projects, and I very rarely get rate limited.
I use Claude Max 20x at work and I rarely hit 10% session utilization, which implies even using Claude to write code all day only uses 2x the Pro token limit.
Are you just telling it to try again when you get a response you don't like?
My 2 cents: Claude is more expensive, but it has something that Codex/GPT lacks that's not easy to quantify. Opus is probably a bigger model (my guess) and trained on code and technical writing (books?) of better qualify compared to GPT.
HOWEVER, it has a flaw that makes some people prefer Codex: out of the box, it's lazy: https://x.com/i/status/2044126543287300248
However, once you learn how to deal with the laziness (which can be dealt with some CLAUDE.md instructions and context docs), Claude shows a better taste for coding. It replicates patterns from the repo, writes more readable/maintainable code, follows instructions, captures implicit information.
GPT/Codex is not a bad model/agent, but it lacks something. It's amazing for code reviews, but it writes code with zero regard to your existing codebase or SOLID/DRY principles. It just likes to output code (a lot of it) that works for the task you gave it right now, with zero regard for maintenance later. And also over-uses defensive programming in a way that quickly makes the codebase unreadable for dynamic languages.
Claude is not perfect, I still have to steer it sometimes to prevent overengineering or duplicate code, but a lot less than when I try Codex (and the built-in /simplify does half of the work for me).