while everyone is somehow still stuck on and fascinated by claude, heres your quick update on the sota of coding models and harnesses mid august 2026

codex is good, both cli and desktop app, you get lots of usage on any plan. sol is good! and gets the job done, write or dictate a very long and thoughtful prompt, and leave sol xhigh or max fast working on it for an hour or so

omp is an amazing harness, any feature claude code or codex is adding has likely already been here for a couple months. good harness which im suggesting to all my developer friends, but for everyone else codex is the better option due to its simplicity and being the plug and play option

claude is decent, but not great. all models are somehow getting restrictive. you get basically unlimited opus on max plans, fable is good but slow and the random guardrails suck soo much which is why i havent used it once in weeks now.

gemini 3.7 is great for speed. everyone is sleeping on it, including even me

kimi k3 - great for frontend, one of the few models thats willing to commit crimes for you AND has the intelligence to have a chance at actually succeeding;

ds pro and flash are fast but not something id actually use for important things, unlike sol, fable and maybe 3.7 here and there

glm 5.3 i haven't tested yet

honorable mention to local models which are actually getting good now! 5090s will continue to get more and more expensive in the coming months. sadly.

theres way way more than claude in this world and its taking people surprisingly long to figure that out. maybe its for the best!

I only have the $20 claude subscription. Last weekend I was doing a fairly heavy task (porting quake to raspberry pi native GLES 1.0) and ran out of claude usage twice, then hooked in with Luna in OpenCode and finished everything off for like $0.40 in tokens, which was impressive.

With Opus 5.0 being kinda crappy vs 4.8, I think Anthropic is in trouble.

> It felt to me that Codex created a much simpler solution in terms of code architecture than Claude.

Wow, I made exactly the opposite experience. Codex loves to make things as complicated as possible, even ignoring instructions and predefined skills. Claude behaves way more pragmatic. Maybe depends on the type of work one does, or even which programming languages/frameworks are used?

I’m sure it depends on the type of work, but for mine, Codex is much more helpful. Honestly, it mostly comes down to it being significantly faster, probably because as many have said, it seems tuned to not spit out word vomit, both in its chat interactions, and its code (Claude is obsessed with massive comment blocks that are basically guaranteed to become dead context noise if you ever use it to iterate on code).

I mostly do very obsessive, tightly scoped, carefully thought out small changes on a fairly boring stack, one interaction at a time, verifying functionality and code. I know what I am doing, but I also know what I don’t like doing (the same exact set of things I’ve already done a dozen times in my career)

For me, codex $100 mo/plan and a claude teams account at work (mostly sonnet, some opus), Claude basically feels about as effective as Codex did 4-5 months ago pre-5.6. Claude still has weird patterns of being confident in one answer while another chat with the same model is confident in another answer, where one answer is clearly wrong. Missed details, over-engineering in places, while still overall helpful and effective. Codex, however, just feels freaking rock solid on Sol high. I literally have zero complaints.

Which models? It is not useful to compare harnesses without this information.

> Changes created by Codex had fewer comments in Ruby/Ruby on Rails code. I liked that a lot, and I will soon share some experiments I ran on this.

Why is fewer comments a good thing?

Agree with most of these.

One thing I don’t love about codex/sol is I find it tends to overengineer and be overly cautious.

I was using it to do create some scraping + data processing.

It went kind of crazy on the provenance, need at least 3 sources of consensus before promoting facts type bullshit.

defined a bunch of enums and gates.

I just wanted scrape some site data and put it into a SQLite dB. Like chill codex.

I feel like Claude is better at that.

>> I think the main difference I feel between Claude and Codex is that Claude tries to go above and beyond what is asked and guess what you might want and then directly do it, while Codex is more like a companion that does what you tell it but will not overdo it. It will stop at the first sign that it might be done.

Damn, my experience is the complete opposite of this. I have posted about it a few times, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49348265

tl;dr I gave GPT 5.6 a small-medium sized ticket, which should have been several hundred lines plus tests. It ended up creating a 25,000+ line diff. Another GPT 5.6 Sol with fresh context looked at the worktree and said 98% of it should be thrown away. Claude thought the same, and suggested that several dozen compactions the model went through over several hours must have caused it to go adrift. I guess that's one consequence of having a relatively small context window.

I still use Sol quite a bit. I find that it's consistently the opposite of what the author describes: it's too relentless. It doesn't know when to stop. Opus is the opposite: it'll give up a bit too easily. If everything goes well that's not an issue, but often times it'll say things like "task is done, btw I couldn't do X Y Z" and X Y Z will be some important verification step that failed because another agent was using that resource or something.

At this point I trust GPT 5.6 mostly with surgical changes, or general codebase exploration tasks. It is a faster model, so it's easier to get small things done with it. For everything else I prefer Claude, despite its annoying tendencies.

I broadly agreed with the authors experience, although I wouldn't say codex does anything "wrong". I think different agents/LLM's have different personalities, and it takes learning to understand how to get them to do what you want. I had the same experience when we started using claude at work, and I was trained on codex. Claude seemed to do everything "wrong", because I was writing instructions designed for codex.

I do agree claude looks for more things to do in your repo, whereas codex is more likely to do what its old and stop. Which is better is personal preference as far as I can tell.