Comment by chandureddyvari

Agreed, had the same experience. Codex feels lazy - I have to explicitly tell it to research existing code before it stops giving hand-wavy answers. Doc lookup is particularly bad; I even gave it access to a Context7 MCP server for documentation and it barely made a difference. The personality also feels off-putting, even after tweaking the experimental flag settings to make it friendlier.

For people suggesting it’s a skill issue: I’ve been using Claude Code for the past 6 months and I genuinely want to make Codex work - it was highly recommended by peers and friends. I’ve tried different model settings, explicitly instructed it to plan first and only execute after my approval, tested it on both Python and TypeScript backend codebases. Results are consistently underwhelming compared to Claude Code.

Claude Code just works for me out of the box. My default workflow is plan mode - a few iterations to nail the approach, then Claude one-shots the implementation after I approve. Haven’t been able to replicate anything close to that with Codex