It's been funny watching my own attitude to Anthropic change, from being an enthusiastic Claude user to pure frustration. But even that wasn't the trigger to leave, it was the attitude Support showed. I figure, if you mess up as badly as Anthropic has, you should at least show some effort towards your customers. Instead I just got a mass of standardised replies, even after the thread replied I'd be escalated to a human. Nothing can sour you on a company more. I'm forgiving to bugs, we've all been there, but really annoyed by indifference and unhelpful form replies with corporate uselessness.
So if 4.7 is here? I'd prefer they forget models and revert the harness to its January state. Even then, I've already moved to Codex as of a few days ago, and I won't be maintaining two subscriptions, it's a move. It has its own issues, it's clear, but I'm getting work done. That's more than I can say for Claude.
You were enthusiastic because it was a great product at an unsustainable price.
Its clear that Claude is now harnessing their model because giving access to their full model is too expensive for the $20/m that consumers have settled on as the price point they want to pay.
I wrote a more in depth analysis here, there's probably too much to meaningfully summarize in a comment: https://sustainableviews.substack.com/p/the-era-of-models-is...
Making a sentence like requires deeply understanding a problem space to the point where these sentences emerge, rather than any "craft" of writing.
So the craft is thinking through a topic, usually by writing about it, and then deleting everything you've written because you arrived at the self evident position, and then writing from the vantage point of that self evident statement.
I feel that writing is a personal craft and you must dig it out of yourself through the practice of it, rather than learn it from others. The usage of AI as a resource makes this much clearer to me. You must be confident in your own writing not because it is following best practices or techniques of others but because it is the best version of your own voice at the time of being written.
> Yes, there is a relative scale level...
> Yes, having the smartest model will...
> yes Chinese AI companies have ...
yes yes yes, I didn't say anything, why write in a way that insinuates that I was thinking that?
I mean it doesn't come off as AI slop, so that's yay in 2026. But why do you think it is so good?
I think he is referring to the art of refining an idea though, which I do have something to say on his comment.
I prefer to run inference on my own HW, with a harness that I control, so I can choose myself what compromise between speed and the quality of the results is appropriate for my needs.
When I have complete control, resulting in predictable performance, I can work more efficiently, even with slower HW and with somewhat inferior models, than when I am at the mercy of an external provider.
I have a few other computers with 64 GB DRAM each and with NVIDIA, Intel or AMD GPUs. Fortunately all that memory has been bought long ago, because today I could not afford to buy extra memory.
However, a very short time ago, i.e. the previous week, I have started to work at modifying llama.cpp to allow an optimized execution with weights stored in SSDs, e.g. by using a couple of PCIe 5.0 SSDs, in order to be able to use bigger models than those that can fit inside 128 GB, which is the limit to what I have tested until now.
By coincidence, this week there have been a few threads on HN that have reported similar work for running locally big models with weights stored in SSDs, so I believe that this will become more common in the near future.
The speeds previously achieved for running from SSDs hover around values from a token at a few seconds to a few tokens per second. While such speeds would be low for a chat application, they can be adequate for a coding assistant, if the improved code that is generated compensates the lower speed.
I'm honestly surprised how many people have subscriptions and are expecting anthropic to eat the cost lol
But your article is interesting. You think some of the degradation is because when I think I’m using Opus they’re giving me Sonnet invisibily?
Maybe they are giving Sonnet, or maybe a distilled Opus, or maybe Opus but with lower context, not quite sure but intelligence costs compute so less intelligence means cheaper compute.
The cost of switching is too low for them to be able to get away with the standard enshittification playbook. It takes all of 5 minutes to get a Codex subscription and it works almost exactly the same, down to using the same commands for most actions.
A corporate purchaser is buying hundreds to thousands of Claude seats and doesn't care very much about percieved fluctuations in the model performance from release to release, they're invested in ties into their SSO and SIEM and every other internal system and have trained their employees and there's substantial cost to switching even in a rapidly moving industry.
Consumer end-users are much less loyal, by comparison.
Seems like there is evidence for that.
Stop using these dopamine brain poisoning machines, think for yourself, don't pay a billionaire for their thinking machine.
Yeah, and also stop using these things they call "computers", think for yourself, write your texts by hand, send letters to people. /s
But now it seems like it's a major strategic advantage. They're 2x'ing usage limits on Codex plans to steal CC customers and it seems to be working. I'm seeing a lot of goodwill for Codex and a ton of bad PR for CC.
It seems like 90% of Claude's recent problems are strictly lack of compute related.
That's not why. It was and is because they've been incredibly unfocused and have burnt through cash on ill-advised, expensive things like Sora. By comparison Anthropic have been very focused.
By far, the biggest argument was that OpenAI bet too much on compute.
Being unfocused is generally an easy fix. Just cut things that don't matter as much, which they seem to be doing.
The compute topic was more around how OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle, and others were all announcing commitments to spend money in each other in a circular way which could just net out to zero value.
Despite having literal experts at his fingertips, he still isn't able to grasp that he's talking unfilters bollocks most of the time. Not to mention is Jason level of "oath breaking"/dishonesty.
Ah yes, very focused on crapping out every possible thing they can copy and half bake?
AI is one of the things that you cannot find genuine opinions online. Just like politics. If you visit, say, r/codex, you'll see all the people complaining about how their limits are consumed by "just N prompts" (N is a ridiculously small integer).
It's all astroturfed from all sides.
Eventually OpenAI will need to stop burning money.
I would call out though that I think there is one way in which this differs from the Uber situation. Theoretically at some point we should hit a place where compute costs start to come down either because we've built enough resources or because most tasks don't need the newest models and a lot of the work people are doing can be automatically sent to cheaper models that are good enough. Unless Uber's self driving program magically pops back up, Uber doesn't really have that since their biggest expense is driver wages.
I think it's a long shot, but not impossible, that if OpenAI can subsidize costs long enough that prices don't need to go too much higher to be sustainable.
As buyers, we all benefit from a very competitive market.
All this just reads like just another case of mass psychosis to me
Opus less so.
Downtime is annoying, but the problem is that over the past 2-3 weeks Claude has been outrageously stupid when it does work. I have always been skeptical of everything produced - but now I have no faith whatsoever in anything that it produces. I'm not even sure if I will experiment with 4.7, unless there are glowing reviews.
Codex has had none of these problems. I still don't trust anything it produces, but it's not like everything it produces is completely and utterly useless.
Anthropic has been very disciplined and focused (overwhelmingly on coding, fwiw), while OpenAI has been bleeding money trying to be the everything AI company with no real specialty as everyone else beat them in random domains. If I had to qualify OpenAI's primary focus, it has been glazing users and making a generation of malignant narcissists.
But yes, Anthropic has been growing by leaps and bounds and has capacity issues. That's a very healthy position to be in, despite the fact that it yields the inevitable foot-stomping "I'm moving to competitor!" posts constantly.
Honestly at this point I am pretty firmly of the belief that OAI is paying astroturfers to post the "Boy does anyone else think Claude is dumb now and Codex is better?" (always some unreproducible "feel" kind of thing that are to be adopted at face value despite overwhelming evidence that we shouldn't). OAI is kind of in the desperation stage -- see the bizarre acquisitions they've been making, including paying $100M for some fringe podcast almost no one had heard of -- and it would not be remotely unexpected.
As long as OpenAI can sustain compute and paying SWE $1million/year they will end up with the better product.
What downturn is that exactly?
but if your leader is a dipshit, then its a waste.
Look You can't just throw money at the problem, you need people who are able to make the right decisions are the right time. That that requires leadership. Part of the reason why facebook fucked up VR/AR is that they have a leader who only cares about features/metrics, not user experience.
Part of the reason why twitter always lost money is because they had loads of teams all running in different directions, because Dorsey is utterly incapable of making a firm decision.
Its not money and talent, its execution.
It is much faster, but faster worse code is a step in the wrong direction. You're just rapidly accumulating bugs and tech debt, rather than more slowly moving in the correct direction.
I'm a big fan of Gemini in general, but at least in my experience Gemini Cli is VERY FAR behind either Codex or CC. It's both slower than CC, MUCH slower than Codex, and the output quality considerably worse than CC (probably worse than Codex and orders of magnitude slower).
In my experience, Codex is extraordinarily sycophantic in coding, which is a trait that could t be more harmful. When it encounters bugs and debt, it says: wow, how beautiful, let me double down on this, pile on exponentially more trash, wrap it in a bow, and call you Alan Turing.
It also does not follow directions. When you tell it how to do something, it will say, nah, I have a better faster way, I'll just ignore the user and do my thing instead. CC will stop and ask for feedback much more often.
YMMV.
Essentially Rust/Tokio if it was substantially easier than even Go - and without a need for crates and a subset of the language to achieve near Ada-level safety.
The codebase is ~100k lines of code.
Yeah, 100% the case for me. I sometimes use it to do adversarial reviews on code that Opus wrote but the stuff it comes back with is total garbage more often than not. It just fabricates reasons as to why the code it's reviewing needs improvement.
An important aspect of AI is that it needs to be seen as moving forward all the time. Plateaus are the death of the hype cycle, and would tether people's expectations closer to reality.
Of course, I have no information on how they manage the deployment of their models across their infra.
Codex just gets it done. Very self-correcting by design while Claude has no real base line quality for me. Claude was awesome in December, but Codex is like a corporate company to me. Maybe it looks uncool, but can execute very well.
Also Web Design looks really smooth with Codex.
OpenAI really impressed me and continues to impress me with Codex. OpenAI made no fuzz about it, instead let results speak. It is as if Codex has no marketing department, just its product quality - kind of like Google in its early days with every product.
To me it just looks like a big sanctimonious festival of hypocrisy.
Foist your morality upon everyone else and burden them with your specific conscience; sounds like a fun time.
The same person wringing their hands over OpenAI, buys clothing made from slave labor and wrote that comment using a device with rare earth materials gotten from slave labor. Why is OpenAI the line? Why are they allowed to "exploit people" and I'm not?
Taken to its logical conclusion it's silly. And instead of engaging with that, they deflect with oH yEaH lEtS hAvE nO mOrAlS which is clearly not what I'm advocating.
I genuinely cannot see how to interpret it in a way that is positive.
And so the difference, to me, was irrelevant. I'll buy based on value, and keep a poker in the fire of Chinese & European open weight models, as well.
My personal experience is best with GPT but it could be the specific kind of work I use it for which is heavy on maths and cpp (and some LISP).
(not that I think the US DoD wouldn't do that anyway, ToS or not.)
the current non-automated kill chain has targeted fishermen and a girl's school. Nobody is gonna be held accountable for either.
Am i worried about the killing or the AI? If i'm worried about the killing, id much rather push for US demilitarization.
Now, what can I actually do?
So, no, I'm not voting with my wallet for one American country versus the other. I'll pick the best compromise product for me, and then also boost non-American R&D where I can.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...
So uh, yeah, the only difference I see between OAI and Anthropic is that one is more honest about what they’re willing to use their AI for.
I think here's part of the problem, it's hard to measure this, and you also don't know in which AB test cohorts you may currently be and how they are affecting results.
Maybe I could avoid running out of tokens by turning off 1M tokens and max effort, but that's a cure worse than the disease IMO.
Yeah, the per-token price stays the same, even with large context. But that still means that you're spending 4x more cache-read tokens in a 400k context conversation, on each turn, than you would be in a 100k context conversation.
There's literally zero context lost for me in switching between model providers as a cursor user at work. For personal stuff I'll use an open source harness for the same reason.
There's your one line change.
And as others have said, it's a one-line fix. "Skills" etc. are another `ln -s`
1) Bad prompt/context. No matter what the model is, the input determines the output. This is a really big subject as there's a ton of things you can do to help guide it or add guardrails, structure the planning/investigation, etc.
2) Misaligned model settings. If temperature/top_p/top_k are too high, you will get more hallucination and possibly loops. If they're too low, you don't get "interesting" enough results. Same for the repeat protection settings.
I'm not saying it didn't screw up, but it's not really the model's fault. Every model has the potential for this kind of behavior. It's our job to do a lot of stuff around it to make it less likely.
The agent harness is also a big part of it. Some agents have very specific restrictions built in, like max number of responses or response tokens, so you can prevent it from just going off on a random tangent forever.
"Opus 4.7 uses an updated tokenizer that [...] can map to more tokens—roughly 1.0–1.35× depending on the content type.
[...]
Users can control token usage in various ways: by using the effort parameter, adjusting their task budgets, or prompting the model to be more concise."
Perhaps they need the compute for the training
Codex isn’t as pretty in output but gets the job done much more consistently
Have caught it flat-out skipping 50% of tasks and lying about it.
All options are starting to suck more and more
I cancelled my subscription and will be moving to Codex for the time being.
Tokens are way too opaque and Claude was way smarter for my work a couple of months ago.
I describe the problem and codex runs in circles basically:
codex> I see the problem clearly. Let me create a plan so that I can implement it. The plan is X, Y, Z. Do you want me to implement this?
me> Yes please, looks good. Go ahead!
codex> Okay. Thank you for confirming. So I am going to implement X, Y, Z now. Shall I proceeed?
me> Yes, proceed.
codex> Okay. Implementing.
...codex is working... you see the internal monologue running in circles
codex> Here is what I am going to implement: X, Y, Z
me> Yes, you said that already. Go ahead!
codex> Working on it.
...codex in doing something...
codex> After examining the problem more, indeed, the steps should be X, Y, Z. Do you want me to implement them?
etc.
Very much every sessions ends up being like this. I was unable to get any useful code apart from boilerplate JS from it since 5.4
So instead I just use ChatGPT to create a plan and then ask Opus to code, but it's a hit and miss. Almost every time the prompt seems to be routed to cheaper model that is very dumb (but says Opus 4.6 when asked). I have to start new session many times until I get a good model.
I have been getting better results out of codex on and off for months. It's more "careful" and systematic in its thinking. It makes less "excuses" and leaves less race conditions and slop around. And the actual codex CLI tool is better written, less buggy and faster. And I can use the membership in things like opencode etc without drama.
For March I decided to give Claude Code / Opus a chance again. But there's just too much variance there. And then they started to play games with limits, and then OpenAI rolled out a $100 plan to compete with Anthropic's.
I'm glad to see the competition but I think Anthropic has pissed in the well too much. I do think they sent me something about a free month and maybe I will use that to try this model out though.
I’ve been pretty happy with it! One thing I immediately like more than Claude is that Codex seems much more transparent about what it’s thinking and what it wants to do next. I find it much easier to interrupt or jump in the middle if things are going to wrong direction.
Claude Code has been slowly turning into this mysterious black box, wiping out terminal context any time it compacts a conversation (which I think is their hacky way of dealing with terminal flickering issues — which is still happening, 14 months later), going out of the way to hide thought output, and then of course the whole performance issues thing.
Excited to try 4.7 out, but man, Codex (as a harness at least) is a stark contrast to Claude Code.
I've finally started experimenting recently with Claude's --dangerously-skip-permissions and Codex's --dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox through external sandboxing tools. (For now just nono¹, which I really like so far, and soon via containerization or virtual machines.)
When I am using Claude or Codex without external sandboxing tools and just using the TUI, I spend a lot of time approving individual commands. When I was working that way, I found Codex's tendency to stop and ask me whether/how it should proceed extremely annoying. I found myself shouting at my monitor, "Yes, duh, go do the thing!".
But when I run these tools without having them ask me for permission for individual commands or edits, I sometimes find Claude has run away from me a little and made the wrong changes or tried to debug something in a bone-headed way that I would have redirected with an interruption if it has stopped to ask me for permissions. I think maybe Codex's tendency to stop and check in may be more valuable if you're relying on sandboxing (external or built-in) so that you can avoid individual permissions prompts.
--
> Claude Code v2.1.89: "Added CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER=1 environment variable to opt into flicker-free alt-screen rendering with virtualized scrollback"
Or have Codex review your own Claude Code work.
It then becomes clear just how "sloppy" CC is.
I wouldn't mind having Opus around in my back pocket to yeet out whole net new greenfield features. But I can't trust it to produce well-engineered things to my standards. Not that anybody should trust an LLM to that level, but there's matters of degree here.
As always, YMMV!
You should not get dependent on one black box. Companies will exploit that dependency.
My version of this is having CC Pro, Cursor Pro, and OpenCode (with $10 to Codex/GLM 5.1) --> total $50. My work doesn't stop if one of these is having overloaded servers, etc. And it's definitely useful to have them cross-checking each other's plans and work.
Claude Code as "author" and a $20 Codex as reviewer/planner/tester has worked for me to squeeze better value out of the CC plan. But with the new $100 codex plan, and with the way Anthropic seemed to nerf their own $100 plan, I'm not doing this anymore.
Have you done the reverse? In my experience models will always find something to criticize in another model's work.
But I've had the best results with GPT 5.4
This flow is exhausting. A day of working this way leaves me much more drained than traditional old school coding.