Claude has gotten noticeably worse for me too. It goes into long exploration loops for 5+ minutes even when I point it to the exact files to inspect. Then 30 minutes later I hit session limits. Three sessions like that in a day, and suddenly 25% of the weekly limit is gone.

I ended up buying the $100 Codex plan. So far it has been much more generous with usage and more accurate than Claude for the kind of work I do.

That said, Codex has its own issues. Its personality can be a bit off-putting for my taste. I had to add extra instructions in Agents.md just to make it less snarky. I was annoyed enough that I explicitly told it not to use the word “canonical.”

On UI/UX taste, I still think current Codex is behind the Jan/Feb era of Claude Code. Claude used to have much better finesse there. But for backend logic, hard debugging, and complex problem-solving, Codex has been clearly better for me. These days I use Impeccable Skillset inside Codex to compensate for the weaker UI taste, but it still does not quite match the polish and instinct Claude Code used to have.

I used to be a huge Claude Code advocate. At this point, I cannot recommend it in good conscience.

My advice now is simple: try the $20 plans for Codex and Cursor, and see which one matches your workflow and vibes best

I had a weird experience at work last week where Claude was just thinking forever about tasks and not actually doing anything. It was unusable. The next day it was fine again.

I'm using the Codex Business subscription (about 30€) already for multiple months. Even there they cut back on the quota. A few months back it was hard for me to reach the limit. Now it is easier.

Still, in comparison with Claude Code, the quota of Codex is a much better deal. However, they should not make it worse...

> Claude has gotten noticeably worse for me too. It goes into long exploration loops for 5+ minutes even when I point it to the exact files to inspect.

This is what I'm working on proving now.

It is more that there is a confidence score while thinking. Opus will quit if it is too high and will grind on if the confidence score is close to the real answer. Haiku handles this well too.

If you give Sonnet a hard task, it won't quit when it should.

Nonetheless, that issue has been fixed with Opus.

I'll try to show that the speed of using Opus on tasks that have medium to hard difficultly is consistently the same price or cheaper than running them with Haiku and Sonnet. While easier tasks, the busy work that is known, is cheaper run with Haiku.

> Claude has gotten noticeably worse for me too.

My experience is limited only to CC, Gemini-cli, and Codex - not Aider yet, trying different combinations of different models.

But, from my experience, CC puts everything else to shame.

How does Cursor compare? Has anyone found an Aider combination that works as well?

> It goes into long exploration loops for 5+ minutes even when I point it to the exact files to inspect.

Give it a custom sandbox and context for the work, so it has no opportunity to roam around when not required. AI agentic coding is hugely wasteful of context and tokens in general (compared to generic chat, which is how most people use AI), there's a whole lot of scope for improvement there.

The product was performing badly and you thought this would be solved by spending more money on it?

When will people realize this is the same as vendor lock-in?

"Maybe if I spend more money on the max plan it will be better" > no it will be the same "Maybe if I change my prompt it will work" > no it will be the same "Maybe if I try it via this API instead of that API it will improve" > no it will be the same.

Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini etc all of these SOTA models are carefully trained, with platforms carefully designed to get you to pay more for "better" output, or try different things instead of using a different product.

It's to keep you in the ecosystem and keep you exploring. There is a reason you can't see the layers upon layers of scaffolding they have. And there's a reason why after 2 weeks post major update, the model is suddenly "bad" and "frustrating". It's the same reason its done with A/B testing, so when you complain, someone else has no issues, when they complain, you have no issues. It muddies the water intentionally.

None of it is because you're doing anything wrong, it's not a skill issue, it's a careful strategy to extract as much engagement and money from customers as possible. It's the same reason they give people who buy new gun skins in call of duty easier matches in matchmaking for the first couple games.

The only mistake you made was paying MORE, hoping it would get better. It won't, that's not what makes them money. Making people angry and making people waste their time, while others have no issues, and making them explore and try different things for longer so they can show to investors how long people use these AI tools is what makes them money.

When competitors have a better product these issues go away When a new model is released these issues don't exist

I was paying a ton of money for claude, once I stopped and cancelled my subscription entirely, suddenly sonnet 4.6 is performing like opus and I don't have prompts using 10% of my quota in one message despite being the same complexity.

When they bumped the context size up to 1m tokens they made it much easier to blow through session limits quickly unless you manually compact or keep sessions short.

Any good reasonable alternatives? Gemini is like prodigious 3yo hopeless for my projects, anybody tested some opencode with kimi or something?

I am also on Codex while Claude seems to be blatantly ignoring instructions (as recently as Thursday: when I made the switch). The huge Claude context helps with planning, so that's all it does now.

Codex consumes way fewer resources and is much snappier.

I wonder if this is in the system prompt: "Go round in circles to make us more money."

> On UI/UX taste, I still think current Codex is behind the Jan/Feb era of Claude Code.

OpenCode is great though, and can (for now) use an OpenAI subscription.

By the way, what are you using it for? I bought Max and Pro plans for Claue and Codex, developed a few apps with it, and after the initial excitation ("Wow I can get results 10x faster!") I felt the net sum is negative for me. In the end I didn't learn much except the current quirks of each model/tool, I didn't enjoy the whole process and the end result was not good enough for my standards. In the end I deleted all these projects and unsubscribed.

Codex has been better for me, but it's WAY too nitpicky/defensive. It always wants to make changes that add complexity and code to solve a problem that's impossible to happen (e.g. a multiprocess race condition on a daemon I only ever run one instance of).

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