In my personal experience the GPT models have always been significantly better than the Claude models for agentic coding, I’m baffled why people think Claude has the edge on programming.
I think for many/most programmers = 'speed + output' and webdev == "great coding".
Not throwing shade anyone's way. I actually do prefer Claude for webdev (even if it does cringe things like generate custom CSS on every page) -- because I hate webdev and Claude designs are always better looking.
But the meat of my code is backend and "hard" and for that Codex is always better, not even a competition. In that domain, I want accuracy and not speed.
This is the way. People are unfortunately starting to divide themselves into camps on this — it’s human nature we’re tribal - but we should try to avoid turning this into a Yankees Redsox.
Both companies are producing incredible models and I’m glad they have strengths because if you use them both where appropriate it means you have more coverage for important work.
GPT 5.2 codex plans well but fucks off a lot, goes in circles (more than opus 4.5) and really just lacks the breadth of integrated knowledge that makes opus feel so powerful.
Opus is the first model I can trust to just do things, and do them right, at least small things. For larger/more complex things I have to keep either model on extremely short leashes. But the difference is enough that I canceled my GPT Pro sub so I could switch to Claude. Maybe 5.3 will change things, but I also cannot continue to ethically support Sam Altman's business.
I'd say that GPT 5.2 did slightly better on the stuff that I'm working on currently compared to Opus 4.5, but it's rather niche - a fancy Lojban parser in Haskell). However Opus is much easier to steer interactively because you can see what it's doing in more detail (although 5.3 is much improved in that regard!). I wouldn't feel empty-handed with either model, and both wrote large chunks of code for this project.
All that said, the single biggest reason why I use Codex a lot more is because the $200 plan for it is so much more generous. With Claude, I very quickly burn through the quota and then have to wait for several days or else buy more credit. With Codex, running in High reasoning mode as standard with occasional use of XHigh to write specs or debug gnarly issues, and having agents run almost around the clock in the background, I have hit the limit exactly once so far.
Didn't make a difference for me. Though I will say, so far 4.6 is really pissing me off and I might downgrade back to 4.5. It just refuses to listen to what I say, the steering is awful.
How many people are building the same thing multiple times to compare model performance? I'm much more interested in getting the thing I'm building getting built, than than comparing AIs to each other.
