I mostly mentioned Claude Code because it's what Mitchell first tried according to his post, and it's what I personally use. From what I hear Codex is pretty comparable; it has a lot of fans. There are definitely some differences and strengths and weaknesses of both the CLIs and the underlying LLMs that others who use more than one tool might want to weight in on, but they're all fairly comparable. (Although, we'll see how the new models released from Anthropic and OpenAI today stack up.) Codex and Gemini CLI are basically Claude Code clones with different LLMs behind them, after all.

IME Gemini is pretty slow in comparison to Claude - but hey, it's super cheap at least.

But that speed makes a pretty significant difference in experience.

If you wait a couple minutes and then give the model a bunch of feedback about what you want done differently, and then have to wait again, it gets annoying fast.

If the feedback loop is much tighter things feel much more engaging. Cursor is also good at this (investigate and plan using slower/pricier models, implement using fast+cheap ones).