> Pre-agent, there wasn't always an obvious difference between models. Various models had their charms. Nowadays, I don't want to entertain anything less than the frontier models. The difference in capability is enormous and choosing anything less has a real cost in terms of productivity.

It's just apples to oranges.

There is not a clear, across the board, winner on non-agentic tasks between Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude - the simple chatbot interface.

But Claude Code is substantially better than Codex which itself is notably better than Gemini-cli.

In this vein, it should not be surprising that Claude Code is way better than non-frontier models for agentic coding... It's substantially better than other frontier models at specialized agentic tasks.

I’ve been comparing Claude Code and Codex extensively side by side over the past couple of weeks with my favorite prompting framework superpowers…

From my perspective, Claude Code is decidedly not better than Codex. They’re slightly different and work better together. I would have no issues dropping CC entirely and using codex 100%.

If you’re working off of “defaults”, in other words no custom prompting, Claude Code does perform a lot better out of the box. I think this matters, but if you’re a professional software developer, I’d make the case that you should be owning your tools and moving beyond the baked in prompts.

I think there's a fair amount of evidence that the heavy harnesses actually drag down performance compared to bare harnesses.

CC is not better than Codex, nor is it better than OpenCode, Crush, Pi etc…