alt Hacker NewsGreat analysis and follows my experience as well. Codex is better when you know how you want the design and the architecture and you drive the agent a lot more aggressively. Claude Code feels like more autopilot so executives and users who didn’t code before AI like it a lot more.
But I feel like an expert who can drive GPT aggressively will out perform Opus. It’s why some smart people I know are opting for GPT and have fallen off on Opus. It’s like asking an F1 driver to sit in a taxi.
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Opus 4.7 (haven't tried 4.8) just really struggles writing correct code for complicated (i.e. valuable) work. I can handle architecture, which takes <1% of my time anyway. But writing code that's wrong is a cardinal sin. I've had much more luck with GPT 5.5 so far.
This is exactly right. Claude has baked in autonomy and preferences that let it handle underspecified prompts elegantly, which makes it seem smarter to people who like to prompt that way, but it also ignores instructions and fights you on things, which makes it a bad model for people who know what they want to do and specify it.