Stick the "Never suppress errors" section into your Claude.md, this will never happen again (works for me with Python/Flask, ymmv for other languages).
Though my feeling, no proof, is that the opus/fable today is not what it was months ago. there was a time for about a month where opus was incredible. Just incredible but as fable started to move out i swear to god it feels like sonnet now. Fable feels like opus used to but costs more.
I tend to define it "better at solving, worse at assisting phenomenon". Which doesn't properly show on benchmarks that only focus on the solving part.
I don't like OpenAI as a company, but they appear to have QA, and that is probably enough to get me to switch.
Basic stuff about features that are more than a week old just get no attention at all. From the outside Athropic seems to be a clear feature factory.
IMO that's exactly why it's a bit better at actual problem solving.
You absolutely do not "always have to correct" Codex. I'm not sure what you're doing, but I'd say 80-90% of its edits on my side it doesn't need any revisions.
this has been my experience with Codex as well, and I have to fix its mistakes every single time. But recently, I literally threw away three hours of work because it kept adding hundreds of lines to my code base. When I restarted the entire work using Fable and Opus, it was like night and day.
Obligatory YMMV, maybe your prompting style fits gpt better. We forget that this matters a lot
To be honest though, I've gotten to the point where I prefer the OpenCode UI. A big win for OpenAI is you can log in to your subscription in OpenCode, whereas this is not trivially achievable for a Claude subscription.
I was getting some really impressive cost efficiency today in OpenCode with the following:
* Main session agent: gpt-5.6-sol (high) via OpenAI subscription
* General purpose subagent: deepseek-v4-pro (high) via OpenCode Go subscription
* Using `obra/superpowers` for subagent driven workflows
* The main session only being allowed filesystem read permissions and everything else delegated
GPT 5.6 was picking up on quality and functional issues from DeepSeek and having it resolve them cleanly, and I didn't even get close to my quotas whereas I can usually blast through them. I feel as people get more comfortable with subagents and mixing and matching models in their daily work, Anthropic's walled garden stance will start to hurt them.
Did they fix that, as that for me was what actually made codex worse.
If anything the online optics have been bad for Anthropic for the last half year. OpenAI doesn't have optics issues, from my point of view they simply have the issue that they are the least trustworthy player at the frontier. The way they pivoted from their original mission is truly breathtaking, especially coming in gloatingly to take the government contract when Anthropic got kicked out for insisting the government does not use their systems for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons systems. You understand what that means, right? OpenAI models are now actively used/developed for mass surveilance and/or autonomous weapons systems.
I know there are plenty here who seem to value their own ability to use these models cheaply above all other considerations. Then OpenAI is a great choice, and much less restrictive than Anthropic. But their problem is not on the optics. It's on the substance.
It's not better at reasoning on complex coding tasks, Claude Opus is still ahead there, but not by a lot.
Gemini is fantastic, however.
But soooooo cheap. Especially for those of us where a monthly sub doesn’t make sense.
Can you post more information about this?
https://www.google.com/search?q=claude+usage+draining+site:w...
Anthropic has certainly had some drama inflicted on them by the US administration, but otherwise they have just had heads down and executed with great focus. That is why they have succeeded.
https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2025/Anthropic-J...
One thing I appreciate with Codex is, OpenAI nowadays sometimes just gives you quota resets you can bank, so when you use up weekly quota before the week ends, you could just reset the quota, to continue using Codex. I've been much less anxious about Codex quota because of this perk. I just used one reset in the bank yesterday, and still have 3 resets left. Whereas with Claude, when you've used 95% quota 3 days before the week ends, you'd be much more anxious.
On the other hand, Claude Code's /remote-control mechanism is extremely helpful when I am running it in the cloud and wants to monitor it or control it on my phone. Codex currently doesn't support this kind of usage. Codex only allows you to use your phone to connect to a session on your desktop, not in the cloud.
It's vastly better this way. Sure, it may impact the bottom line but it's a huge customer satisfaction win.
When Anthropic randomly resets me and I've only used 2%, that's worthless. When OpenAI tells me I have 3 resets available to use whenever I want - it's wonderful.
It’s amazing how much work you can get done on your phone now, especially if you already have a design mapped out in your head.
One killer feature that Claude has, and AFAIK Codex still lacks, is the ability to start a session in the terminal and then hand it off (actually just remotely control it), from the iOS app.
Last time I tried Codex on iOS it required a ton of set up to link a github project etc. The way claude lets me remote into a session I've already started on my actual machine is much better IMHO.
You sign in the Codex app on your Mac same on iOS and are able to completely control your sessions - fork, side chats, plugins - everything.
It’s really great i often work through it. And you can connect any number of Codex instances on any number of macs and then manage them all through the iOS app.
Just use termux on your phone and connect to a tmux session on your server.
Codex won't know the difference.
Not sure if there's a Termux equivalent for iPhone.
1. Run `codex remote-control --help` directly on your Linux server. 2. From the desktop app, connect to your Linux box, start Codex there, and make it remotely controllable.
Either approach will get you set up.
1. Install another copy of codex in a special dir on the Linux machine:
$ curl -fsSL https://chatgpt.com/codex/install.sh | sh
$ ~/.codex/packages/standalone/current/codex remote-control start
$ ~/.codex/packages/standalone/current/codex remote-control pair
4. Voila! The codex sessions running on the Linux machine now show up on the phone!
That's actually pretty awesome. Anthropic's random resets often have me scrambling to launch huge sessions to make the most of them before the weekly rollover. The gacha-like mechanics are maddening.
I personally find GPT-5.5 to be a better programmer than Opus 4.8, it is extremely thorough, but I don't like the code it generates ("austere"), and find Opus 4.8 to write more "human friendly" code. The programming comments GPT-5.5 makes is pretty awful where-as Opus 4.8 is good. I feel like Opus 4.8 is better at grasping my intention than GPT-5.5, and honestly find GPT-5.5 to be kind of "autistic". I do prefer the language (not the writing) of GPT-5.5, as I find the philosophical flowery language of Opus 4.8 kind of annoying.
I have only managed to try Fable 5 a little bit, which feels like a much more generally smarter version of Opus 4.8, that is much better a programming and grasping your intention, and I think even the intention of your code, and is _really_ good at spotting bugs or problems with logic in your code. It feels wicked smart but is extemely expensive. It feels smart in the sense like it has a "bigger brain" and is much more sensitive to subtleties/details.
These are different "brains", have different "personalities", etc. I think the best thing is to develop a feeling for it yourself.
Codex historically will follow tasks more closely with less creativity, whereas Opus will do more than you specify. I wouldnt consider either one better due to this fact, just makes them useful for different situations. Generally they'll perform similarly for most tasks.
Opus and Fable dominate 5.5 in artistic design (pixel art, ascii art), and edge out 5.5 slightly in general UI design taste. Have not tested Sol in that regard yet.
So far in my usage Sol has been superior to Fable at graphics rendering engine optimization.
Codex will work longer, and in single sessions without as much subagent usage.
Codex only has 256k context but its compaction is absolutely next level. You will not notice compactions and they will happen multiple times during a complex task or set of tasks without you ever having to notice or care. Claude code on the other hand still has fairly poor compaction.
Codex has more generous usage limits, and they also give you usage resets (weekly+5h resets) that you can bank for a month or so. Not sure how often they give these out.
Codex also seemingly never has outages or weird delays like Claude code does.
OpenAI randomly resets usage just like Anthropic does
I would use both if you code often
After 6+ months of exclusive Claude Code usage, I was begrudgingly forced to try Codex once Anthropic rejiggered their limits such that I kept maxing out my $200/mo plan in just a few days. These days I pay both $200/mo plans, and it's just about enough to get me through a week's work (small game studio - infinite code to write!)
Curious: what multiplier do you think your productivity has increased by, from before AI?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/10ek380/co...
Simple UI change? I do an AI review, but otherwise neither read nor write the code. The models are good enough they write better UI code than me, 9 out of 10 times. Not always the more idiomatic, but usually safer and more correct.
Change to our core data plane? I might spend 2-3 times more effort reviewing it than before AI. Yes, I go more slowly than pre-AI. Many more reviews, many more angles considered, including both human and (lots of) AI review cycles.
Most code is not that critical, and AI is also scarily good at writing tests. We also spend considerably more time paying down tech debt and testing thanks to AI, now that the cost is near-zero.
Net: I spend 10-25X less time on low-risk changes. I often direct (or at least approve) the implementation approach, but I rarely read this code. I spend 2-3X more time on high-risk changes. In both cases, I never write code "by hand". Since about November, I've had no reason to actually edit code in a code editor (perhaps maybe except .env files, which we don't allow agents to edit for obvious reasons).
AI is a tool. You can use it to go fast recklessly, or you can use it to go slow with confidence. Just like before AI... the skill and art of engineering is knowing when to do which.
:-) I hope you read those tests before claiming it's "scary good"
Having said that, in truth, I almost never read the unit tests. Before AI, we had almost none (see: several person game studio) so the tradeoff is not "AI-generated tests" vs "human written ones", it's whether we have tests at all. So, I take them for what they're worth - not much - but if it catches an extra regression before it ships every now and then, it was worth it for the price (~free).
I can’t imagine a more useless test, but I get that it wants to verify that it actually made the change. I just delete the test when it’s done.
I have 10+ of these workspaces in parallel, and I context switch between them as I get blocked on things. I manage the workspaces using `herder`, which is a terrific tmux-like tool that allows me to keep those workspaces on a nixOS machine I have at home that I SSH into via tailscale, so my agents don't stop working every time I close my laptop (it also lets me leverage that machine's computing resources instead of running dozens of servers and harnesses on my poor MacBook).
They've also introduced banked resets, which are really clever. If you have a $200/month plan and three banked resets, you're not churning because you will overweight giving up those resets (loss aversion theory).
But what I love about Openai is that they still let you hook OTHER harnesses up to a subscription. My Pi setup has been built up for a few months now into exactly what I want and moving over to CC or even Codex is really annoying.
Caveat: I vibe code in tiny little chunks. I see what I want to do, and exactly how I want it done, then prompt that, refine, what was output, then repeat. I bet Fable is better at building a whole app from a 2-sentence prompt; but that's just not important to me at all.
I have my context managed in a structured (but nowadays way too big) Obsidian Vault. I also built myself a vector based "vault search" capability and have my harness use this as a tool to find thematically similar things across the different contexts, when needed. I also build a few custom skills and extensions for my harness to be able to do my work.
Talking about harness: I use pi.dev and have taken care of, that i set it up in a way as to easily be able to switch the intelligence layer without loosing context. Yes, there are differences in how well models perform, but if a model refuses a task - like gpt-5.5 not willing to build a downloading tool for Annas Archive - I switch the model to something less finicky.
Thus I was able to switch to gpt based models after about a year with Claude (and having had a Claude Max since the early days it was available).
I played a lot with other models recently, to see how stabl my setup is for switching, should something like Fable happen on a broader scale with the US government. As said, minor changes in tonality, minor issues ith the quality of long text being written by the model, but most of it is actually managed in by the tonality docs, guard rails, coding standards and the likes, I set up over the last 9+ months of intensive work with it (first in Claude Code, then Codex and now as said pi.dev).
So YMMV and it heavily depends on your setup. But I more and more treat those models as interchangable.
They're different models with different philosophies behind them. This is anecdotal with a user group of 1, but in my experience:
Claude has a stronger personality and is more creative. If you give it vague instructions, it's better at filling in the blanks with reasonable ideas.
GPT-5.5 is better at following instructions. If you know exactly what you want, it will do it without going off the rails. It's also less likely to imply that you're dumb, but I don't really care about that. Some people do.
I had put a decent amount of effort into setting up that initial codex attempt and it went so poorly that i've been entirely uninterested in trying again. This was maybe a month or so ago, and i know stuff moves fast, but for me, i like the models, dont care for the harness.
You can also make it not count against extra usage.
OpenCode docs show it because Anthropic specifically ambushed them with a PR to remove support so simpletons can't use it easily.
This is one reason it surprised me that Anthropic decided to run stuff on Musk's hardware. It seems overwhelmingly likely that the new Grok release is informed by what Musk has been able to learn from that relationship.
Further, the claim that the subscription "version" of the model is worse sounds like bullshit (and the sort of anecdotal nonsense that you see on sites like this). Do you have anything substantiating this?
For personal stuff, I've been pretty happy with chatgpt's $20 plan. I believe it has considerably higher limits than claude's $20 plan, and it's enough for the personal stuff I play with (hermes, and some small coding stuff). Also allows me to keep up to date on openai models.
I've been using it with hermes and some coding (with opencode), and I am getting a LOT more than one feature out of it, but the work is spread throughout the week.
I have a bunch of Claude Code Plugins and yesterday asked Codex to make them accessible to itself. It wanted to rewrite most of it. I was hoping i could get by with some symlinks or something to avoid drift.
Claude lost my trust around February this year when the plan would say nonsensical things as "delete this method" that was clearly a key method on that part of the codebase.
For personal projects I am using Codex 20$ plan and when that is over I use DeepSeek which is insanely good for the cost.
Consensus is probably the wrong word for the popular opinions reflected in HN that you might get.
I would recommend that you have 2 of each at all times when it comes to AI so you don't necessarily become overly locked to quirks of one thing. You'll soon realize that things move so fast that you just start internalizing common patterns instead of depending on one specific vendor.
I recommend that you try pi and codex besides claude, to get your own feel for it.
I do almost all my regular coding tasks with Codex 5.5 on medium. Sometimes for niche edge cases, or when I run out of tokens on my Codex sub, I'll switch to Claude. Some recent examples where Claude was able to solve things Codex couldn't:
- 3D gamedev layout: I asked Codex to render a solar system in a certain camera positioning, saying it needed to fit the planets of the system to the viewport. Codex just couldn't do it, even on high reasoning: Claude Opus did it first attempt.
- Tricky Tiptap image drag-n-drop layout implementation: Codex failed this after numerous iterations. Claude Opus also struggled mightily to get it to work, but I think around 3 attempts it nailed it. Both of them ended up grepping the Tiptap code from node_modules - that's the kind of task it was.
But these are really isolated examples. Across all my projects (I have many; mostly TypeScript, but also things like C#), Codex "Just Works" (tm), with minimal prompting effort from me.
IMO the two biggest problems not really being answered by both OpenAI and Anthropic are: 1. Why not make specific models good at specific tasks for Codex/Claude Code. Theres a handful of types of work here whereby small good quality models would do better than these generalised all purpose models whereby someone discovers Fable is bad at biology.... 2. Why cant they consistently run these models and keep them performing? Performance of the models seems to directly correlate with amount of compute available, but they dont talk about it...
I'm trying Codex as my primary the last day or so, because I'm at 98% use and reset in 3 days on Claude. I'm worried about a lot of our skills and CLAUDE.mds and the like getting lost unless I migrate them, but otherwise codex seems to be working great.
I installed the Claude Code Codex skill provided by Anthropic and I am having Claude invoke it automatically to review all plans and changes. The nice thing about this is that for an additional $20/month pro plan I can extend the runway for Claude rate limiting and compare frontier model responses. I am looking for more ways now to work in Codex as a subagent that gets used automatically from Claude Code.
This is using the same AGENTS.md prompts, which were designed firstly for Claude use, so maybe it's something that could be optimized better if I understood gpt as well?
However you can do what you are asking "fable--> sol" you need to setup a mcp or have fable run a bash tool, just invoke the `codex.exe` cli tool with whatever cmdline args are needed.
Personally, I find it very interchangeable. I open codex --yolo or claude with whatever there yolo flag is (have an alias).
Claude's very bloated and convoluted by comparison. Maybe you need the bloat (Claude Design), but I prefer the more razor's edge efficiency of Codex.
Model wise, I can't really tell. They all do what I want them to do most of the time and go off the rails occasionally. The question is increasingly becoming who's faster and cheaper and gives me more tokens, not who's better.
https://arena.ai/leaderboard/agent
5.6 isn’t on there yet but Fable leads by a significant margin atm
Not having to deal with Anthropics constantly changing policies, token-gating, and carrot-and-stick marketing helps me to focus on work, rather than dealing with their company problems.
I didn’t think I could have found a better solution, spawning multiple subagents with different models is such a great thing.
I built in the past very small cli wrappers to call other models; Claude Code often refuses to do that, lies and does the job itself instead of delegating to another provider’s llms.
You're fully free to use and try anything and without caring about what others think is right
I have one non technical people in my firm using it. One is using it to assist with editing books, basically using it to gather up manuscripts from e-mail / Google Doc etc. submissions, and then switch models between a cheap one and Opus (for actually analysing the manuscript).
The other non-technical person has done really surprising things with it AI, like a long-running GPT 5.5 Pro chat session which is basically her expense tracker - it has an .xlsx file "carried" in the chat, and she just tells ChatGPT (or scans a receipt) whenever she has a new expense, and then prompts it in natural language when she needs a report. I'm looking forward to seeing what she can do with omp.
I've tried a fuck load of harnesses but keep coming back to Codex as my harness.
> Well it's objective _to me_
Care to detail this?
It's more diligent and empirical and results focused, and less creative. It sometimes needs a kick to avoid a Zeno's paradox of incremental steps to get to the goal. But it produces more reliable code with fewer race conditions, unhandled negative cases, etc.
It's also better value from a $$ POV, or at least has been. This fluctuates a bit.
You're also free to use your Codex subscription with other harnesses, like opencode, etc. Unlike Anthropic. Plays better with others.
Codex with GPT 5.5 is much better at general SWE tasks but Claude Code with Opus is far better at complex reasoning tasks like reading and summarizing research papers, replicating experiments, identifying research gaps and proposing interesting follow ups.
- built-in image generation using your subscription, which can be super handy
- can actually edit Google Docs and Google Sheets (Claude can only create new or sometimes append)
- I get a surprising amount of mileage out of the $20 plan
They both have their places for sure.
Between the two the biggest difference by far is ... getting your harness / AGENTS.md / skills / tools set up right.
It is so hard to tell at this point between the models to make generalizations like this.
Just complete nonsense.
- codex UI is much more responsive
- i get feedback about the progress easily
- the tool calls and results are very legible, I can click them and see the progress
- no one talks about this but the tool call and response notification are handled much more elegantly in Codex. In Claude Code, it is handled in a clunky way using loops which always causes some delay
- you can steer the conversation midway in Codex
- /side is underrated (/btw is the equivalent and is much worse in Claude Code)
- I have to admit subagents are handled better in Claude Code
You get much more generous usage from the 20x plan.
And you get far better uptime.
If benchmarks and early tester impressions are accurate, you also get access to Fable level capability at greater speed and lower cost (included in subscription).
$2 says nah. You can't take Fable away in a week where GPT-5.6 and Grok 4.5 launch, if you want to hold on to customers.
Knowing Anthropic, this unfortunately might end up meaning a quietly quantized Fable on subscription.
Coca-Cola doesn't "quietly water down" its product to save a few bucks. They know people will take a sip, say "oh that's not what i wanted", and go buy a Pepsi.
If they serve me a quantized Fable, I'm just going to think Fable sucks and go get my tokens elsewhere. What's the point?
Coca-Cola is also mostly measurable and reverse-engineerable.
The Claude models are black boxes, and actively curtail distilling efforts.
Codex is more details focused, often catches wonky bugs and correctness issues that Fable misses, feels more terse and less "friendly", more like a stern senior engineer versus a friendly talkative engineer (Claude). Codex is also better if you're already an engineer, Claude is better for non-engineers. I.e. Codex works better if you know exactly what you want and know the right way of explaining it.
Codex writes all of the code, no exceptions.
Works great, especially when you ask Claude to break up large CRs into roughly 10 minutes of Codex work each.
I use Codex because it's better at the kind of code I need written (math-heavy, 3D geometry code).
But if I was doing mainly UI code, I would do the opposite.
Codex and Claude Code are not mutually exclusive, you can use both.
Try Pi: https://pi.dev/
pi is also worth tinkering with, particularly if you have an eye towards automating some things.
I tried them both side by side, mostly for reviewing existing Godot/GDScript code, or sometimes generating Swift Mac apps, including converting ancient relics I wrote eons ago in Visual Basic on Windows
Codex was consistently better than Claude: https://i.imgur.com/jYawPDY.png
Besides the useless "This is good" findings while reviewing and the excessive "oops you're right" backtracking, Claude's atrocious UX and borderline "spyware" make me never want to try an Anthropic product again for a long long while.
Can they all be wrong/paid-off?