Yes, GPT5-series thinking models are extremely pedantic and tedious. Any conversation with them is derailed because they start nitpicking something random.

But Codex/5.2 was substantially more effective than Claude at debugging complex C++ bugs until around Fall, when I was writing a lot more code.

I find Gemini 3 useless. It has regressed on hallucinations from Gemini 2.5, to the point where its output is no better than a random token stream despite all its benchmark outperformance. I would use Gemini 2.5 to help write papers and all, can't see to use Gemini 3 for anything. Gemini CLI also is very non-compliant and crazy.