Codex is very "miss the forest for the trees", but is much better at successfully making large changes in large codebases. Claude Code makes more mistakes, but has more taste and a better grasp on idiomatic and elegant software development.
If you can afford to, I recommend juggling both.
This is not a jab, but a genuine curiosity of mine.
But I feel like an expert who can drive GPT aggressively will out perform Opus. It’s why some smart people I know are opting for GPT and have fallen off on Opus. It’s like asking an F1 driver to sit in a taxi.
Admittedly my recent experience tilts Opus now 4.8, but you and others have my interest piqued re: GPT-5.5 Codex so I'm trying that more now.
As far as its tone... Both feel like sycophantic as hell to me. To be honest, they just all feel so.
So does Claude, what’s your point?
I used it and ChatGPT this week in trying to assist troubleshooting a complex DB related issue and Claude had to apologise no less than three times in which it admitted to talking complete shit.
Just one example of the kind of shit it dribbled:
> I need to be upfront with you. I should not have claimed X as if I knew that for a fact. That was overreach on my part.
Modern tupperware party.
A colleague was convinced Claude is better so we played a game. We used the claude code and codex harness and I implemented some prs they needed with gpt5.5 and opus4.7 and asked them to identify which came from which only from the code.
Couldn’t tell.
Edit: i bet 99% of people here, if i presented a test where i gave 5 models but all of the results came from one would be able to discern this. Just vibes all the way down.
I don’t think that applies to most on here tho.
Edit: Oh they’re trolling, nm. :-/
Like actually iterating hard to make them useful. Many, many details matter here.
I haven't tested the similar OpenAI/Google tools in detail lately though. Previously I found them way too generic and unpolished to be useful.
Is there something to this?
Anthropic has much narrower capabilities. No image generation, no video generation, no 3d world models, barely any voice stuff. But they know who their target customers are, and their API has a model selection anyone can understand and pricing that rarely changes. Focus and predictably
Nobody is investing in closed-source labs for safety reasons, being able to explore more in details what and how the model is thinking is nice but by no means a game changer. What matters to investors and most of the users is that the model gives the right answer at the end.
They'll kill us all, or they'll kill each other. They sure as hell ain't making the world a better place, like they promised.
OpenAI. Spent its resources on AGI whilst Claude worked on making programming work.
Google Gemini is out of the race entirely its programming AI is a joke.
> The new valuation is nearly three times higher than the company’s February valuation, when Anthropic was estimated to be worth around $380 billion.
> In March, OpenAI was valued at $852 billion following a record $122 billion funding round.
Basically, today (Late May) we're declaring Anthropic the most valuable. They've nearly tripled in value since February. But also, OpenAI was $852B in March and presumably has grown since then.
In a few weeks we'll either have a new rounding of funding for OpenAI or they'll announce their IPO and the hype train will be abuzz that they're now the most valuable.
Just curious how you can afford to care about the guy 7 levels above the men that built and support the API that you buy.
Of course every AI company has been over promising and pumping the numbers as much as possible but OpenAI has been hitting the reality wall more because both their people not being able to keep improving at a faster rate and their whole cost structure and financial plates spinning.
This doesn't invalidate the fact Anthropic is also overhyped to the max for their IPO.
The chutzpah is remarkable.
FWIW most of the normies I know are using Claude
I can tell. It's night and day.
Last year I used a bunch of models to try to generate Rust code. They all sucked.
This February I tried again and used Claude to generate Rust code. I have never been more stunned in my life. It's just as good as I am, and 30x faster. No fluff, the code is verbatim just as I would have written.
I then tried other models. Total disappointment.
I've continued to repeat this experiment. Opus is the only model that can write Rust reasonably.
Codex produces junk to this day. It passes variables that aren't needed, it abuses pointers, it creates overly verbose monstrosities...
I don't want any single company to win. I want OpenAI to be competitive. I want open source models to win. But right now, Claude Code and Opus are it.
Having looked at a bunch of known or suspected (based on the intent of the code and/or what I know about the developer(s)) LLM generated rust, there's only a few explanations here:
1. You're way better at prompting than (virtually) anyone else.
2. You're vastly overestimating how good the rust code it produced is.
3. You handheld the model throughout and made lots of edits.
4. Your hand written rust code is very bad.
Because from every example I've seen, these models write horrible rust. Sure, it may technically pass all the tests, but it's horribly pessimized, badly organized, doesn't even attempt to use the type system, if there aren't bugs now there will be the second it tries to refactor or add a new feature, etc. etc.
(I also strongly suspect that the same would be true for other languages, but I can detect it in rust more easily because it's my main language)
They served caviar. It probably had good ROI.
I have a strong affinity for Claude Code because of the interaction experience and overall tone / vibe / process. I am 100% willing to believe the code it produces is identical or possibly less good than Codex.
I enjoy working with Claude in a way I just don’t get from OpenAI. YMMV, you may feel just the opposite. But it’s a mistake to look at the produced code as the only dimension of these products.
It is like the employee who is slightly worse but is a brownnoser getting promoted more often.
And what do you know, that is what is happening. It is like the coke commercial with the nice music and beautiful person in the back.
Speaking of which, remember Pepsi Challenge? Coke lovers are like the claude code lovers.
And it really depends on the task. Is it a typical well defined bug, or is it simpel CRUD. Or does it require research, combining different sources of data in a complex and creative ways.
This is also why benches never show reality, and the only real understanding comes if you actually try to build something.
Repeat after me:
_Other people can experience things you do not experience and it is still valid, and not a delusion_. They are not sheeple who fell for marketing.
I have no idea how this wasn't the end of Anthropic's positive public perception.
So much faith and money in this idea, and seeing how fragile it is, does not look good.
1) Brockman ($25M) and Altman ($1M) both personally donated to Trump/MAGA.
2) Anthropic pushed back against DOD's demand for unrestricted use of AI to kill people while OpenAI eagerly said "please use ours!".
Yup, like billions of capex. Unlike vim.
You definitely can. That’s the entire point. If one tool completes it in 10 minutes with little hand holding, and the other does in in one hour with 4× the cost and while needing a lot of steering, the former is arguably better even if the end result is the same.
While there is no meaningful difference in the ability to write code, vim has earned it's reputation for having a learning curve. I'd argue that predisposition, that requirement for additional investment energy will bias the results towards attention to detail, and pure minimalism.
Same reason people buy the RTX 4090 and 5090 cards - overpriced but they must have the "best". Never mind the diminishing returns trying to max out PC settings (3-4x performance hit for an almost imperceptible increase in graphics, ignoring DLSS) - it's the psychological cost of having to move a slider down a notch.
I've been using Google and now DeepSeek v4 and I am having absolutely no problems and it's a fraction of the cost. I'd love for Claude to be 10x better but it just isn't, for my use case anyway.
I think it’s great, but coming from Claude Code it did feel like going back in time by ~6 months in model capabilities. This isn’t a big deal to me for what I do, but the difference is definitely there.
Convinced you can distinguish A from B? Ok! No problem, let's try! Can be at the dinner table for fancy wine or with agents, it's all the same, you try an option, another option, maybe all options from the same, and if you reliably can't tell well kudos, you are just like the rest of us!
It's easy to "know" in retrospect but blind test is where genuine difference can be found. Or not.
It's the same reason why most of the software out there keeps using bloated technologies that are most of the time the wrong fit for the product.
And the same applies to tooling. Nothing new.
For example in your "test" you're only looking at output and ignoring the entire process of creation.
In addition to that process, you're ignoring that Claude Code was first and better for a long time, why would people switch for something that produces the same output? Claude Code has been way ahead in the process of agentic software creation for a long time, I still prefer its features. Even though I think that Opus 4.7 was a big step backwards, and I've been getting worse results seemingly every day with the churn of features at Claude Code, some of that may also be me testing the bounds of how little I can specify and still get acceptable results, so it's hard to know.
Calling all these concrete realities "marketing" is itself you trying to market Codex as "good enough" instead of paying attention to how we got where we are and where we will go in the future.
king_zee•55m ago
tapoxi•44m ago