Comment by tvmalsv
5 days ago
My monthly subscription for Claude is up in a week, is there any compelling reason to switch to Codex (for coding/bug fixing of low/medium difficulty apps)? Or is it pretty much a wash at this point?
5 days ago
My monthly subscription for Claude is up in a week, is there any compelling reason to switch to Codex (for coding/bug fixing of low/medium difficulty apps)? Or is it pretty much a wash at this point?
Wait for new GPT release this/next week and then decide based on benchmarks. That is what I will do.
One main thing is to de-couple the repos from specific agents e.g. use .mcp.json instead of "claude plugins", use AGENTS.md (and symlink to CLAUDE.md) and so on.
I love this because I have absolutely 0 loyalty to any of these companies and once Anthropic nerfs I just switch to OpenAI, then I can switch to Google and so on. Whichever works best.
FWIW, I've found Codex with GPT-5.4 to be better than Opus-4.6; I would say it's at least worth checking out for your use case.
I've been switching between both depending on which one is having a good week — and that's the honest answer for most people right now.
But the real issue I ran into wasn't which model is better. It's that every time I switched, I lost weeks of accumulated context. The AI didn't know my project's conventions anymore, didn't remember the architecture decisions, didn't know what was tried and rejected.
What helped me was separating the project context from the tool. Keep the conventions, rules, and decisions in plain files in the repo. Both Claude Code and Codex can read them at session start. Then the question becomes "which model is sharper this week" instead of "can I afford to lose my context."
The answer to your question: it's mostly a wash on capability. The real cost of switching is the context you don't realize you're rebuilding.
at least for our scope of work (data, interfacing with data, building things to extract data quickly and dump to warehouse, resuming) claude is performing night and day better than codex. we're still continuing tinkering with codex here to see if we're happy with it but it's taking a lot more human-in-the-loop to keep it from going down the wrong path and we're finding that we're constantly prompt-nudging it to the end result. for the most part after ~3 days we're not super happy with it. kinda feels like claude did last year idk. it's worth checking out and seeing if it's succeeding at the stuff you want it to do.
I'm switching because of the higher usage limits, 2x speed mode that isn't billed as extra usage, and much more stable and polished Mac app.
> 2x speed mode that isn't billed as extra usage
...at least for my account, the speed mode is 1.5x the speed at 2x the usage
Whoops yes I meant 1.5x speed!
Honestly, just try it. I used both and there's no reason to not try depending on which model is superior at a given point. I've found 5.4 to be better atm (subject to change any time) even though Claude Code had a slicker UI for awhile.