Don't sleep on Codex
Claude Code is all the rage, and for good reason. It is by far my favorite coding tool1 in the world right now. But ChatGPT Codex is becoming slightly underrated, at least if I judge by the media I consume.
Web-based Codex excels, for me at least, in this kind of task:
- It's a small to large-ish (so, sub-"very long-running") task;
- You want to one-shot it;
- So, in particular, it's OK (and actually desirable) to defer to the tool's judgment for implementation decisions that are underspecified by the task;
- You're willing to take it on as a separate unit of work (so, not far down the Yegge adoption curve).
I'm quite sure that Codex is great with other work styles; that Claude Code gives excellent results with series of one-off jobs; and that one should be trying to move beyond the paradigm of feeding one-off jobs to generative AI. But:
- Many of us are in fact feeding series of one-off jobs to generative AI;
- Codex usage limits are pretty generous for the $20 ChatGPT subscription many people already pay for;
- In my experience, Codex has a wonderful batting average at getting these one-off jobs right, quickly, with informative PR- and commit-level documentation.
It also has many wonderful non-coding applications.↩