I think Claude is more practically minded. I find that OAI models in general default to the most technically correct, expensive (in terms of LoC implementation cost, possible future maintenance burden, etc) solution. Whereas Claude will take a look at the codebase and say "Looks like a webshit React app, why don't you just do XYZ which gets you 90% of the way there in 3 lines".

But if you want that last 10%, codex is vital.

Edit: Literally after I typed this just had this happen. Codex 5.2 reports a P1 bug in a PR. I look closely, I'm not actually sure it's a "bug". I take it to Claude. Claude agrees it's more of a product behavioral opinion on whether or not to persist garbage data, and offer it's own product opinion that I probably want to keep it the way it is. Codex 5.2 meanwhile stubbornly accepts the view it's a product decision but won't seem to offer it's own opinion!

Correct, this has been true for all GPT-5 series. They produce much more "enterprise" code by default, sticking to "best practices", so people who need such code will much prefer them. Claude models tend to adapt more to the existing level of the codebase, defaulting to more lightweight solutions. Gemini 3 hasn't been out long enough yet to gauge, but so far seems somewhere in between.