alt Hacker NewsMy experience is that the GPT-family of models are very smart and figure out bugs, edge cases a bit better, but it produces code that is much less mergable – if you review the code, it introduces a lot more useless/inappropriate heavy abstractions and wrapper functions, compared to the Claude-family models which introduces the right amount of straightforward human-style code.
I can recognize so much of the GPT/Codex generated code long after it gets merged (not by me).
Additionally, the time spent on every agent turn on GPT 5.5 is much longer compared to Claude Opus 4.8, which means iterating on the code takes a lot more patience, and there's a lot more nitpicks to pick when actually using GPT 5.5 to do software engineering.
Feels like GPT-style models are more geared on doing one-shot software vibing (and handling the vibe coded mixture) compared to Claude's focus on actual software maintenance. I got a GPT Pro sub for free and wanted to cancel my Claude subscription so much, but I still keep reaching Claude models a lot more. Frustrating.
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I'm not sure if i do something differently but i have the exact opposite experience with these models. Claude always feels like it's generating way too overdesigned and hard to understand code with the vibe oriented feel while codex is cleaner and more "task at hand" and easier to work with.
I echo your observations. I expect you will enjoy deepseek-v4-pro for writing code. Much closer to that Opus experience, and very cost-effective too. With 5.5 as a reviewer and specialist, all bases are covered.
Have you tried iterating on style feedback in AGENTS.md? I've been reasonably successful using this to get it to output code in a terse, non-defensive style that matches my hand-written code.
GPT-5.5 did a significantly worse job than Qwen-3.7-Max on a job today (some devops tasks I wanted to create some reusable scripts for). Kind of disappointing.
This is my experience as well. I have defined a CLAUDE.md rule to ask codex to automatically code review, and I tell it that the reviewer is very picky and to only implement what it considers valuable feedback. I hope they don't converge over time, currently, in combination they works really well.
I noticed too, that whatever they offer in the chat, for free, is smarter, as in no more bs. I use claude code and I want to try codex too but I don't need two subscriptions. I did try codex for some planning and it was really good. Thanks for giving me an insight into how it generates code.
i had this same complaint but no offense to you it turned out i was just not using the models right.
ai llm are doing what i tell them to.
if you’re building something meaningful (in my case a platform used by many people across many companies) you want to ensure you
1. have actual systems engineering and architecture in mind that you want the models to
2. implement based on what you tell it to do
when i was just telling the models what i want done without doing due diligence it would go and do some moronic implementation that was awful. mid input = mid output
these days i just maintain specifications documents and the AI follows everything i tell it to in that document. so when i tell it to dos one thing, the result is made following those architecture specs.
i have code that is single resp, modular, easy to extend and test.
i would ballpark 95% of the time i get what i asked for.
sometimes it tries to be clever in cases that weren’t covered in my arch specs. in those 5% of cases i go and update my specs.
source: used billions of tokens worth to build something actually in production across both mobile platforms and web, deployed on my own cloud infra. i use codex mainly. some claude.
"5. DON'T FUCKING OVERENGINEER! WRITE THE SIMPLEST CODE THAT CAN POSSIBLY WORK! NO NESTED LAYERS OF ABSTRACTION! NO UNNECESSARY CLASSES OR METHODS! NO DESIGN PATTERNS UNLESS THEY ARE ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY! NO MAGIC! NO SHENANIGANS! JUST THE DAMN CODE THAT GETS THE JOB DONE IN THE MOST STRAIGHTFORWARD WAY POSSIBLE! THE FIRST PRIORITY IS TO WRITE CODE THAT IS EASY TO READ AND UNDERSTAND AND READ!!!"
this is the line I keep in Agents.md that helps me prevent Codex from playing smart