Comment by qsort
8 days ago
I'm with you that people are insanely hyped about Claude Code in particular when e.g. Codex isn't far behind (and with recent models I actually prefer it).
But I'm going to need a citation for this:
> a lot of GenZ and young Millenials who were already bitter at their employers have used the tokenmaxxing push to sabotage the AI
The 3 people on reddit doing this don't even register on a company budget. What seems more plausible to me is that budgets were calibrated to spending before agents were actually useful, and late '25/early '26 changed the pattern significantly.
Codex is actually significantly better than Claude Code now, assuming you have a clear idea of what you want to do and how. Claude's secret sauce is that it'll run off and do stuff that's mostly right without a lot of prompting, but that also makes it willful/disobedient and causes it to be bad for "finishing" work, since it'll circle around your objective in an opinionated way.
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/nearly...
Hey, would you mind elaborating a bit on this:
> assuming you have a clear idea of what you want to do and how
I mean, if I have a sufficiently clear idea of what and how, then surely just coding it manually would work significantly better. Unless maybe I am a painfully slow typer.
Without some level of "actually I'm not sure exactly" permitted, then I'm not really sure what LLMs bring to the table.
Even when you have a clear idea of what you want, there are still hundreds of decisions you need to make while building it, both big and small. Everything from what to name your database tables and columns to what data structures are optimal and what the API payloads should look like and what the tech stack should be. Anyone with a sufficient level of experience in this field has made these types of decisions dozens of times and at some point it becomes more practical to have an AI do it for you and for you to quickly skim it.
For example I want to make it so that users receive an email when their password is changed. I can either do it myself, which requires reviewing and remembering code I’ve written five plus years ago and then wiring everything up and obsessing over the wording of the email. Or I can give a two sentence instruction to the AI, work on something more meaningful while it is doing its thing, and then test it in under 60 seconds when it is done.
If I want to create a web app with a back-end, database, and some services, and I tell codex to do that with a specific stack and using specific paradigms to keep the code performant and maintainable, it's still a win over coding it by hand, as models can emit ~200char/sec compared with maybe ~10 for a really fast human. There's up front planning cost, and you will have to go back and massage some of the outputs a little bit if you're particular, but for sizeable tasks it still comes out to be a big win.
If you're just working on a single react component or an algorithm to do stuff with data, there's less chance to amortize the up front planning and verification so it comes out more of a wash.