Comment by bayesianbot

Comment by bayesianbot 10 hours ago

53 replies

I've been extremely impressed (and actually had quite a good time) with GPT-5 and Codex so far. It seems to handle long context well, does a great job researching the code, never leaves things half-done (with long tasks it may leave some steps for later, but it never does 50% of a step and then just randomly mock a function like Gemini used to), and gives me good suggestions if I'm trying to do something I shouldn't. And the Codex CLI also seems to be getting constant, meaningful updates.

mmaunder 10 hours ago

Agreed. We're hardcore Claude Code users and my CC usage trended down to zero pretty quickly after I started using Codex. The new model updates today are great. Very well done OpenAI team!! CC was an existential threat. You responded and absolutely killed it. Your move Anthropic.

  • Jcampuzano2 9 hours ago

    To be fair, Anthropic kinda did this to themselves. I consider it as a pretty massive throw on their end in terms of the fairly tight grasp they had on developer sentiment.

    Everyone else slowly caught up and/or surpassed them while they simultaneously had quality control issues and service degradation plaguing their system - ALL while having the most expensive models comparatively in terms of intelligence.

    • mmaunder 9 hours ago

      Agreed. I really wish Google would get their act together because I think they have the potential of being faster, cheaper with bigger context windows. They're so great at hardcore science and engineering, but they absolutely suck at products.

      • bjackman 9 hours ago

        I think this is being downvoted coz it doesn't seem to be really responding to the thread, and maybe it isn't, but for anyone who hasn't tried Gemini CLI:

        My experience after a month or so of heavy use is exactly this. The AI is rock solid. I'm pretty consistently impressed with its ability to derive insights from the code, when it works. But the client is flaky, the backend is flaky, and the overall experience for me is always "I wish I could just use Claude".

        Say 1 in 10 queries craps out (often the client OOMs even though I have 192Gb of RAM). Sounds like a 10% reliability issue but actually it just pushes me into "fuck this I'll just do it myself" so it knocks out like 50% of the value of the product.

        (Still, I wouldn't be surprised if this can be fixed over the next few months, it could easily be very competitive IMO).

      • echelon 8 hours ago

        I really do not want Google to win anything. They're a giant monopoly across multiple industries. We need a greater balance of power.

        Antitrust enforcement has been letting us down for over two decades. If we don't have an oxygenation event, we'll go an entire generation where we only reward tax-collecting, non-innovation capital. That's unhealthy and unfair.

        Our career sector has been institutionalized and rewards the 0.001% even as they rest on their laurels and conspire to suppress wages and innovation. There's a reason why centicorns petered out and why the F500 is tech-heavy. It's because big tech is a dragnet that consumes everything it touches - film studios, grocery stores, and God only knows what else it'll assimilate in the unending search for unregulated, cancerous growth.

        FAANG's $500k TC is at the expense of hundreds of unicorns making their ICs even wealthier. That money mostly winds up going to institutional investors, where the money sits parked instead of flowing into huge stakes risks and cutthroat competition. That's why a16z and YC want to see increased antitrust regulations.

        But it's really bad for consumers too. It's why our smartphones are stagnant taxation banana republics with one of two landlords. Nothing new, yet as tightly controlled an authoritarian state. New ideas can't be tried and can't attain healthy margins.

        It's wild that you can own a trademark, but the only way for a consumer to access it is to use a Google browser that defaults to Google search (URLs are scary), where the search results will be gamed by competitors. You can't even own your own brand anymore.

        Winning shouldn't be easy. It should be hard. A neverending struggle that rewards consumers.

        We need a forest fire to renew the ecosystem.

  • notfromhere 8 hours ago

    Gpt5 writes clean, simple code and listens to instructions. I went from tons of Claude APi usage to usage to basically none overnight

    • ttul 5 hours ago

      Agreed. GPT’s coding is so much cleaner. Claude tends to ramble and generate unnecessary scaffolding. GPT’s code is artful and minimalist.

  • ttul 5 hours ago

    This just goes to show how crucial it was for Anthropic and OpenAI to hire first class product leads. You can’t just pay the AI engineers $100M. Models alone don’t generate revenue.

    • dwohnitmok 3 hours ago

      I got the exact opposite lesson. The parent and grandparent comments seem to be talking about dropping one product for another purely on the strength of the model.

  • epolanski 6 hours ago

    But how do you use it?

    It's super annoying that it doesn't provide a way to approve edits one by one instead it either vibe codes on its own or gives me diffs to copy paste.

    Claude code has a much saner "normal mode".

    • brianjking 4 hours ago

      Wait, this wasn't what I was experiencing. Did something change in gpt-5-codex or was that your normal experience?

vitorgrs 2 hours ago

Gemini seems to be pretty awful as agentic coding. It always finish the task, and when I see the result, it just breaks my code.

Not sure the fault it's "doing bad code", I guess it's just not being good at being agentic. Saw this on Gemini CLI and other tools.

GLM, Kimi, Qwen-Code all behaves better for me.

Probably Gemini 3 will fix this, as Gemini 2.5 Pro it's "old" by now.

robotswantdata 8 hours ago

Agreed ditched my Claude code max for the $200 pro ChatGPT.

Gemini cli is too inconsistent, good for documentation tasks. Don’t let it write code for you

  • icelancer 8 hours ago

    Gemini's tool calling being so bad is pretty amazing. Hopefully in the next iteration they fix it, because the model itself is very good.

    • nowittyusername 5 hours ago

      This is a recurring theme with Google. Their models are phenomenal but the systems around them are so bad that it degrades the whole experience. Veo3 great model horrible website, and so on...

      • brianjking 4 hours ago

        Their massive increase in token processing since Veo3 and nano banana have been released would say otherwise...

        Or we're all just used to eating things we don't like and smiling.

    • robbrulinski 6 hours ago

      That has been my experience as well with every Gemini model, ugh!

DanielVZ 5 hours ago

Can someone compare it to cursor? So far i see people compare it with Claude code but I’ve had much more success and cost effectiveness with cursor than Claude code

  • bionhoward 3 hours ago

    Doesn’t compare, because Cursor has a privacy mode. Why would anyone want to pay OpenAI or Anthropic to train their bots on your business codebase? You know where that leads? Unemployment!

EnPissant 10 hours ago

My experience with Codex / Gpt-5:

- The smartest model I have used. Solves problems better than Opus-4.1.

- It can be lazy. With Claude Code / Opus, once given a problem, it will generally work until completion. Codex will often perform only the first few steps and then ask if I want to continue to do the rest. It does this even if I tell it to not stop until completion.

- I have seen severe degradation near max context. For example, I have seen it just repeat the next steps every time I tell it to continue and I have to manually compact.

I'm not sure if the problems are Gpt-5 or Codex. I suspect a better Codex could resolve them.

  • brookst 10 hours ago

    Claude seems to have gotten worse for me, with both that kind of laziness and a new pattern where it will write the test, write the code, run the test, and then declare that the test is working perfectly but there are problems in the (new) code that need to be fixed.

    Very frustrating, and happening more often.

    • elliot07 10 hours ago

      They for sure nerfed it within the last ~3 weeks. There's a measurable difference in quality.

      • conception 10 hours ago

        They actually just had a bug fix and it seems like it recently got a lot better in the last week or so

  • apigalore 4 hours ago

    Yes, this is the one thing stopping me from going to Codex completely. Currently, it's kind of annoying that Codex stops often and asks me what to do, and I just reply "continue". Even though I already gave it a checklist.

    With GPT‑5-Codex they do write: "During testing, we've seen GPT‑5-Codex work independently for more than 7 hours at a time on large, complex tasks, iterating on its implementation, fixing test failures, and ultimately delivering a successful implementation." https://openai.com/index/introducing-upgrades-to-codex/

  • M4v3R 10 hours ago

    Context degradation is a real problem with all frontier LLMs. As a rule of thumb I try to never exceed 50% of available context window when working with either Claude Sonnet 4 or GPT-5 since the quality drops really fast from there.

    • darkteflon 9 hours ago

      Agreed, and judicious use of subagents to prevent pollution of the main thread is another good mitigant.

    • EnPissant 10 hours ago

      I've never seen that level of extreme degradation (just making a small random change and repeating the same next steps infinitely) on Claude Code. Maybe Claude Code is more aggressive about auto compaction. I don't think Codex even compacts without /compact.

      • Jcampuzano2 10 hours ago

        I think some of it is not necessarily auto compaction but the tooling built in. For example claude code itself very frequently builds in to remind the model what its working on and should be doing which helps always keeps its tasks in the most recent context, and overall has some pretty serious thought put into its system prompt and tooling.

        But they have suffered quite a lot of degradation and quality issues recently.

        To be honest unless Anthropic does something very impactful sometime soon I think they're losing their moat they had with developers as more and more jump to codex and other tools. They kind of massively threw their lead imo.

  • bayesianbot 10 hours ago

    I definitely agree with all of those points. I just really prefer it completing steps and asking me if we should continue to next step rather than doing half of the step and telling me it's done. And the context degradation seems quite random - sometimes it hits way earlier, sometimes we go through crazy amount of tokens and it all works out.

  • tanvach 10 hours ago

    I also noticed the laziness compared to Sonnet models but now I feel it’s a good feature. Sonnet models, now I realize, are way too eager to hammer out code with way more likelihood of bugs.

mritchie712 10 hours ago

Have you used Claude Code? How does it compare?

  • mmaunder 9 hours ago

    It's objectively a big improvement over Claude Code. I'm rooting for anthropic, but they better make a big move or this will kill CC.

    • nightshift1 8 hours ago

      What are the usage limits like compared to Claude Code? Is it more like 5× or 20×? For twice the price, it would have to be very good.

      • naiv 8 hours ago

        https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11369540-using-codex-wit...

        have to say not sure what this even means and what the exact definition of a message is in this context.

        with claude code max20 I was constantly hitting limits, with codex not once yet

        • mmaunder 7 hours ago

          Same. We're not hitting limits at all with Codex and it's ridiculously good at managing and preserving its context window while getting a metric fuckton of work done. It's kind of unbelievable actually. I don't know re billing. Not my dept.

FergusArgyll 9 hours ago

It doesn't seem to have any internal tools it can use. For example, web search; It just runs curl in the terminal. Compared to Gemini CLI that's rough but it does handle pasting much better... Maybe I'm just using both wrong...

  • Tiberium 9 hours ago

    It does have web search - it's just not enabled by default. You can enable it with --search or in the config, then it can absolutely search, for example finding manuals/algorithms.