A lot of (carefully hedged) pro Codex posts on HN read suspect to me. I've had mixed results with both CC and Codex and these kinds of glowing reviews have the air of marketing rather than substance.
If only fair comparisons would not be so costly, in both time and money.
For example, I have a ChatGPT and a Gemini subscription, and thus could somewhat quickly check out their products, and I have looked at a lot of the various Google AI dev ventures, but I have not yet found the energy/will to get more into Gemini CLI specifically. Antigravity with Gemini 3 pro did some really wonky stuff when I tried it.
I also have a Windsurf subscription, which allows me to look at any frontier model for coding (well, most of the time, unless there's some sort of company beef going). This I have often used to check out Anthropic models, with much less success than Codex with > GPT-5.1 – but of course, that's without using Clode Caude (which I subscribed to for a month, idk, 6 months ago, and seemed fine back then but not mind blowingly so).
Idk! Codex (mostly using the vscode extension) works really well for me right now, but I would assume this is simply true across the board: Everything has gotten so much better. If I had to put my finger on what feels best about codex right now, specifically: Least amount of oversights and mistakes when working on gnarly backend code, with the amount of steering I am willing to put into it, mostly working off of 3-4 paragraph prompts.
I’ve been using frontier Claude and GPT models for a loooong time (all of 2025 ;)) and I can say anecdotally the post is 100% correct. GPT codex given good enough context and harness will just go. Claude is better at interactive develop-test-iterate because it’s much faster to get a useful response, but it isn’t as thorough and/or fills in its context gaps too eagerly, so needs more guidance. Both are great tools and complement each other.
Heya, I'm the author! I can promise you that I am 0% affiliated with OpenAI and have no qualms with calling them out for the larger moral, ethical, and societal questions that have emerged with the strategy they've pushed.
I do earnestly believe their models are currently the best to work with as software developers, but as I state in my post I think this is the state of the world today and have no premonition for that being true forever.
Same questions apply to Anthropic, Google, etc, etc — I'm not paid by anyone to say anything.
The usage limits on Claude have been making it too hard to experiment with. Lately, I get about an hour a day before hitting session/weekly limits. With Codex, the limits are higher than my own usage so I never see them.
Because of that, everyone who is new to this will be focused on Codex and write their glowing reviews of the current state of AI tools in that context.
As the author of the post I think it was a nice quick post to share my perspective of a behavior I’ve been seeing across many (but not all) developers recently, but I’m always open to feedback for how to improve my writing!
And as I mentioned here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46392900) I have no affiliation with any of the organizations, nor care to evangelize any of them. Nobody pays me to write, I’m just a guy on the internet sharing his thoughts, building software, and teaching people how to use AI better with any tool people want to use. :)
