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Comment by jmcodes

16 hours ago

Same loved them, told my team about them, got them to switch off of cursor, now I'm telling them to swap to Codex.

Anthropic really pissed me off with their harness crap. They're well within their rights but their communication over it was enough to get me to swap. I don't need extra hurdles when there's a perfectly valid alternative right there. They don't have the advantage they think they do.

I think we are inevitably heading to using the cheap Chinese models like Kimi, GLM, and Minimax for the bulk of engineering tasks. Within 3-6 months they will be at Opus 4.6 level.

  • This was literally my task today, to try out Qwen 9B locally on my, albeit a bit memory-constrained at 18GB, macbook with pi or opencode. Before reading this update.

  • Kimi 2.6 works roughly like Opus 4.6, when it used to work. Depending on the task, a bit better or a bit worse. And it's MUCH cheaper.

    • From this morning: I had a single go file with like 100 loc, I asked it to add debug prints, it thought for 5+ minutes, generating ~1m output token and did not actually update my file.

  • Anthropic will kick and scream as those are often distilled from their latest models and is cutting into their margin. Though it is not like their hands are clean neither, it is just a different type of stealing, an approved one :-)

One thing I enjoy about Cursor and Codex mac apps is the embedded preview window. I know it's not as hardcore as the terminal/tmux but it's hella convenient. But Cursor bugs me with the opacity around what model I'm using. It seems deliberately to be routing requests based on its perceived complexity. What draws you to codex vs cursor?