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Comment by bluegatty

6 hours ago

Your intuition is exactly correct - it's not just 'tone' it's 'deeper than that'.

Codex is a 'poor communicator' - which matters surprisingly a lot in these things. It's overly verbose, it often misses the point - but - it is slightly stronger in some areas.

Also - Codex now has 'Spark' which is on Cerebras, it's wildly fast - and this absolutely changes 'workflow' fundamentally.

With 'wait-thinking' - you an have 3-5 AIs going, because it takes time to process but with Cerebras-backed models ... maybe 1 or 2.

Basically - you're the 'slowpoke' doing the thinking now. The 'human is the limiting factor'. It's a weird feeling!

Codex has a more adept 'rollover' on it's context window it sort of magically does context - this is hard to compare to Claude because you don't see the rollover points as well. With Claude, it's problematic ... and helpful to 'reset' some things after a compact, but with Codex ... you just keep surfing and 'forget about the rollover'.

This is all very qualitative, you just have to try it. Spark is only on the Pro ($200/mo) version, but it's worth it for any professional use. Just try it.

In my workflow - Claude Code is my 'primary worker' - I keep Codex for secondary tasks, second opinions - it's excellent for 'absorbing a whole project fast and trying to resolve an issue'.

Finally - there is a 'secret' way to use Gemini. You can use gemeni cli, and then in 'models/' there is a way to pick custom models. In order to make Gem3 Pr avail, there is some other thing you have to switch (just ask the AI), and then you can get at Gem3 Pro.

You will very quickly find what the poster here is talking about: it's a great model, but it's a 'Wild Stallion' on the harness. It's worth trying though. Also note it's much faster than Claude as well.

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bluegatty

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embedding-shape  6 hours ago

Spark is fun and cool, but it isn't some revolution. It's a different workflow, but not suitable for everything that you're use GPT5.2 for with thinking set to high, for example, it's way more dumb and makes more mistakes, while 5.2 will carefully thread through a large codebase and spend 40 minutes just to validate the change actually didn't break anything, as long as you provide prompts for it.

Spark on the other hand is a bit faster at reaching a point when it says "Done!", even when there is lots more it could do. The context size is also very limiting, you need to really divide and conquer your tasks, otherwise it'll gather files and context, then start editing one file, trigger the automatic context compaction, then forget what it was doing and begin again, repeating tons of time and essentially making you wait 20 minutes for the change anyways.

Personally I keep codex GPT5.2 as the everyday model, because most of the stuff I do I only want to do once, and I want it to 100% follow my prompt to the letter. I've played around a bunch with spark this week, and been fun as it's way faster, but also completely different way of working, more hands-on, and still not as good as even the gpt-codex models. Personally I wouldn't get ChatGPT Pro only for Spark (but I would get it for the Pro mode in ChatGPT, doesn't seem to get better than that).

  • bluegatty  6 hours ago

    Spark is the 'same model and harness' but on Cerebras.

    Your intuition may be deceiving you, maybe assuming it's a speed/quality trade-off, it's not.

    It's just faster hardware.

    No IQ tradeoff.

    If you toy around with Cerebras directly, you get a feel for it.

    Edit: see note below, I'm wrong. Not same model.

Bnjoroge  4 hours ago

Agree with this except that spark is good or worth it. Absolutely not for $200, it's a step or two below opus 4.6 for actual reasoning.