Comment by ltbarcly3

Codex is extremely bad to the point it is almost useless.

Claude Code is very effective. Opus is a solid model and claude very reliably solves problems and is generally efficient and doesn't get stuck in weird loops or go off in insane tangents too often. You can be very very efficient with claude code.

Gemini-cli is quite good. If you set `--model gemini-3-pro-preview` it is quite usable, but the flash model is absolute trash. Overall gemini-3-pro-preview is 'smarter' than opus, but the tooling here is not as good as claude code so it tends to get stuck in loops, or think for 5 minutes, or do weird extreme stuff. When Gemini is on point it is very very good, but it is inconsistent and likely to mess up so much that it's not as productive to use as claude.

Codex is trash. It is slow, tends to fail to solve problems, gets stuck in weird places, and sometimes has to puzzle on something simple for 15 minutes. The codex models are poor, and forcing the 5.2 model is expensive, and even then the tooling is incredibly bad and tends to just fail a lot. I check in to see if codex is any good from time to time and every time it is laughably bad compared to the other two.