Claude Code vs. Codex: I built a sentiment dashboard from Reddit comments
15 comments
·October 16, 2025the_duke
ripped_britches
That’s falsifiable quite easily by measuring tokens per second.
Rather, the real reason codex takes longer is that it does more work to read more context.
IMO the results are much better with codex, not even close
fragmede
Where codex falls short is in background processing, both running a daemon in the background and using its output as context while simultaneously being interactive for the user, and with subagents, ie, do multiple things in parallel. Presumably codex will catch up, but for now, that puts Claude Code ahead of things for me.
As far as which one is better, it's highly dependent on what we're each doing, but I will say that I have this one project where bare "make" won't work, and I have a script that needs to be run instead. I have instructions to call that script in multiple .md files, and codex is able to call the script instead of make, but it keeps forgetting that and tries to run make which fails and it gets confused. (Claude code running on macOS host but build on Linux vm.) I could work around it, but that really takes the "shiny" factor off of codex+GPT-5 for me.
_heimdall
Its interesting to me that Codex has such high sentiment. I'm definitely an outlier on the more principled end of the spectrum, but I refuse to use OpenAI products.
I take issue with the AI industry in general and the hand-wavy approach to risk, but OpenAI really is on another level in my book. While I don't trust the industry's approach to AI development, with OpenAI I don't trust the leaderships' intentions.
mikeocool
Reading the comments and posts about both Claude Code and Codex on Reddit (and often hacker news), it’s hard to imagine they’re not extremely astroturfed.
There seems to be constant stream of not terribly interesting or unique “my Claude code/codex success story” blog posts that mange to solicit so many upvotes.
nickstinemates
Meanwhile I am talking about unique shit with Claude Code trying to draft on that sentiment for little to no traction with them. We've built the best way to automate and manage production infrastructure using these models and no one gives a shit. It's so weird.
fragmede
In life, it helps to be skeptical, so the real question is where do I find real life humans to ask about their experiences? And even then, they could still be paid actors. Though, I've often wondered how would that work. Like, the marketing department staffed by hot people finds developers and then offers to Venmo them $500 to write something nice online about the product? It's a big Internet, and there's a lot of people on Upwork, so I'm not saying it isn't happening, but I've never gotten an email asking me to write something nice about Claude Code in exchange for a couple of bucks.
extr
Notice how pricing is the top discussion theme. People love free shit and it's hard to deny codex usage limits are more generous. My 2c for someone who uses both tools pretty consistently in an enterprise context:
- Codex-medium is better if you have a well articulated plan you "merely" need to execute on, need help finding a bug, have some specific complex piece of logic you need to tweak, truly need a ton of long range context to reason about an issue. It's great and usage limits are very generous!
- Sonnet 4.5 is better for everything else. That means for me: non-coding CLI ops, git ops, writing code with it as a pair programmer, OOD tasks, big new chunks of functionality that are highly conceptual, architectural discussion, etc. I generally approve every edit and often interrupt it. The fast iteration and feedback is key.
I probably use CC 80% of the time with Codex the other 20%. My company pays for CC and I don't even look at the cost. Most of my coworkers use CC over Codex. We do find the Codex PR reviewer to be the best of any tool out there.
Codex gets a lot of play on twitter also because a lot of the most prolific voices there are solo devs who are "building in public". A greenfield, solo project is the ideal (only?) use case for running 5 agents in parallel or whatever. Codex is probably amazing at that. But it's not practical for building in enterprise contexts IMO.
quintu5
For larger tasks that I know are parallelizable, I just tell Claude to figure out which steps can be parallelized and then have it go nuts with sub-agents. I’ve had pretty good success with that.
visiondude
Ah bots analyzing bots. Seems openai has a larger bot army than Anthropic rn
candiddevmike
Need to go to conferences and actually talk to people to understand what Real People (TM) think of GenAI.
aaronSong
openai's crawling is the best. just following anthropic's way
kazinator
Sucks-Rules-o-Meter, but 2025.
In my experience gpt5-codex (medium) and codex-cli is notably better than Sonnet 4.5 and claude-code. (note: never tried Opus)
It is slower, but the results are much more often correct and it doesn't rush into half-baked solutions/dumb approaches as eagerly.
I'd much rather wait 5 minutes than have to clean up manually or try to coax a model into doing things differently.
I also wouldn't be surprised if the slowness was partially due to OpenAI being quite resource constrained. They are repeatedly complaining about not having sufficient compute.
Bigger picture: I think all the AI coding environments are incredibly immature. There are many improvements to be unlocked.