Comment by aerhardt
3 months ago
Codex has been good enough to me and it’s much cheaper.
I code non-trivial stuff with it like multi-threaded code and at least for my style of AI coding which is to do fairly small units of work with multiple revisions it is good enough for me to not to even consider the competition.
Just giving you a perspective on how the benchmarks might not be important at all for some people and how Claude may have a difficult time being the definitive coding model.
>> Codex has been good enough to me and it’s much cheaper.
It may be cheaper but it's much, much slower, which is a total flow killer in my experience.
Not to start a war but I've had 'fast' Claude write reams of slop code that I then have had to work with Codex to remove. Add this to the pile of "yeah but I saw the opposite with <insert model>" - but that's been my 2 cents.
Putting the latest Gemini CLI through some tough code tasks (C++) for my project, I found it to be slower than even Codex but good quality.
The problem I have is skepticism. Gemini 2.5 Pro was amazing on release, I couldn't stop talking about it. And then it went to being worthless in my workflows after a few months. I suspect Google (and other vendors) do this bait and switch with every release.
Let me see the benchmarks in 3 months.
Claude can definitely write a lot of not-great code, but IME that's easy enough to mitigate by having it write a planning document first, then implement it step by step based on a to-do list on that planning document. Cursor's plan mode works great for this. It lets you review the outline at the start, then review each bit as the model writes it.
That said, I haven't had a good experience with Claude Code for the reason you described. Maybe it's Cursor (or similar IDE) that makes the difference.
My issue with codex is needing to run it in wsl in windows, due to it spamming confirmation requests for running even the safest of commands (eg list directory contents, read file, git status) which in turn adds an extra layer of complexity hooking it up via MCP to anything running in windows outside of wsl (like say figma)
In Claude on the other hand, MCP connections really do seem to ‘just work’