It was generally smarter than pre-5.2 so strategically better, and codex likewise wrote better database queries than non-codex, and as it needs to iteratively hunt down the answer, didn't run out the clock by drowning in reasoning.
Video: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-breaking-bots-cheating-at-blue-t...
We'll be updating numbers on 5.3 and claude, but basically same thing there. Early, but we were surprised to see codex outperform opus here.
I find both Codex and Claude Opus perform at a similar level, and in some ways I actually prefer Codex (I keep hitting quota limits in Opus and have to revert back to Sonnet).
If your question is related to morality (the thing about US politics, DoD contract and so on)... I am not from the US, and I don't care about its internal politics. I also think both OpenAI and Anthropic are evil, and the world would be better if neither existed.
Exact same situation here. I've been using both extensively for the last month or so, but still don't really feel either of them is much better or worse. But I have not done large complex features with it yet, mostly just iterative work or small features.
I also feel I am probably being very (overly?) specific in my prompts compared to how other people around me use these agents, so maybe that 'masks' things
I have a hypothesis that people who have patience and reasonably well-developed written language skills will scratch their heads at why everyone else is having so much difficulty.
There's no mention of pricing, quotas and so on. Perhaps Codex will still be preferable for coding tasks as it is tailored for it? Maybe it is faster to respond?
Just speculation on my part. If it becomes redundant to 5.4, I presume it will be sunset. Or maybe they eventually release a Codex 5.4?
I can tell claude to spawn a new coding agent, and it will understand what that is, what it should be told, and what it can approximately do.
Codex on the other hand will spawn an agent and then tell it to continue with the work. It knows a coding agent can do work, but doesn't know how you'd use it - or that it won't magically know a plan.
You could add more scaffolding to fix this, but Claude proves you shouldn't have to.
I suspect this is a deeper model "intelligence" difference between the two, but I hope 5.4 will surprise me.
That's not the experience I have. I had it do more complex changes spawning multiple files and it performed well.
I don't like using multiple agents though. I don't vibe code, I actually review every change it makes. The bottleneck is my review bandwidth, more agents producing more code will not speed me up (in fact it will slow me down, as I'll need to context switch more often).
My own tooling throws off requests to multiple agents at the same time, then I compare which one is best, and continue from there. Most of the time Codex ends up with the best end results though, but my hunch is that at one point that'll change, hence I continue using multiple at the same time.