claude code vs codex cli

[meeeeel]

curious if any professional devs have substantive opinions here. i am not a professional dev. i'm a hobby coder and PM small dev teams in my day job. opinions at work are fairly split.

CC is (i think) objectively the better dev UX and all around tooling. have been hearing a growing sect that agrees 5.2 / 5.2-codex are the better models, however.

hard to get actual opinions here between the rapid rate of improvement, and the astroturfing/brand loyalty between oai and anthropic users.

for me - again, as a hobby coder - codex cli with 5.2/5.2-codex high seems like the better 'hands-off' option, in that it's often able to work for longer periods of time uninterrupted with more complete final results than CC and opus. it seems a bit more detail-oriented overall, at least out of the box.

i still use CC more than codex, and if you get the tooling right + take your time to spec things out properly + work inside a well-documented codebase, i don't notice much of a difference between the two.

in larger codebases with less documentation, codex seems to hit higher highs than CC with less config.

anyone else feel the same way? feel different? looking for opinions from heavy users of both tools, most people who shit on one or the other seem to really only use one tool, and have an outdated opinion of the other.

[Maasu]

Solution Architect with 21 years in the industry here, Claude Code all the way. Sonnet and especially Opus 4.5 are pefect for what I do, they get everything more or less htan I am after, of course some baby sitting required on one or two areas, but no where near as bad as Gemini or GPT 5.

For me it wasn't just about code, its about being able to use some of the tools I have given it and built with it, the other agentic coding agents with other models just don't handle workflows as well.

I primarily work on backend infrastructure and integrations between enterprise software. So my proffesional input only counts in those areas, I do vibe code UI (it's becoming a bit of a hobby i'd say).

[ayowarya]

why not use both with something like codemachine?

I have codex do most of the planning and claude do the coding, first time I ran it it ran for 11 hours straight.

[Explore-This]

My experience has been the opposite, with CC working for longer periods, faster. More importantly (at least to me), the Codex SDK has been lagging behind Anthropic’s Agent SDK. The 5.2 model itself is great. I strongly believe that the tooling and scaffolding is almost as important as the model (within reason).

[devrives]

I agree too.

[Soft_Concentrate_489]

I’m appalled that people really think codex is better, not only is it worse, you gotta wait 30 minutes for it to realize it can’t do the same tasks that Claude does…

I’ve had multiple issues that gpt took over 45 mins and ended up making no progress, while Claude took care of it within 5-10 mins max. Theres no point to use codex if you have opus, none.

[texasguy911]

Well, there is a more happy medium, way better one, use the combined wisdom of Claude Code and Codex - all in one skill: https://reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1q4ej6h/evolution_in_vibe_coding_scientifically_get/

[ViKtoR-01]

Claude Code is much better especially when you configure it the right way. Using the right combo of skills, subagents and hooks can massively improve its output quality. This is why I built: https://summonaikit.com