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.

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!)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Personally, I find it very interchangeable. I open codex --yolo or claude with whatever there yolo flag is (have an alias).

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.

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 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.

Between the two the biggest difference by far is ... getting your harness / AGENTS.md / skills / tools set up right.

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?

Can they all be wrong/paid-off?

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.

https://arena.ai/leaderboard/agent

5.6 isn’t on there yet but Fable leads by a significant margin atm

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.

You're fully free to use and try anything and without caring about what others think is right

- 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).

Try Pi: https://pi.dev/

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.

Codex and Claude Code are not mutually exclusive, you can use both.

I tried them both side by side, mostly for reviewing existing Godot/GDScript code, or sometimes generating Swift Mac apps, including converting ancient artifacts I wrote 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 are right" backtracking, Claude's atrocious UX and borderline "spyware" make me never want to try an Anthropic product again for a long long while.