alt Hacker NewsCodex is HN's darling now because Anthropic lowered rate limits for individuals due to compute constraints. OAI has so few enterprise users they can afford to subsidize compute for this group a lot more than Anthropic.
Eventually once they have more users they'll do the same thing as Anthropic, of course.
It's all a transparent PR play and it's kind of absurd to see the X/HN crowd fall for it hook, line, and sinker.
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Call it fall for it, but here are my two experiences, with both applications open. ($20/month plan for both)
- Claude: Good for ~20 minutes of work once every 4 hours
- Codex: Good for however long I want to use it.
So Anthropic degraded their product. OAI updated their product to meet for exceeded Anthropic old product.
This is normal behavior and not a cause for such a hyperbolic response.
There's a systematic marketing campaign from oai on reddit and HN - there's a huge uptick of "codex is better than claude code" comments and posts this last week which is perfectly timed with the claude code increased limits
This is true. But Anthropic did us dirty most recently and so it’s their turn on the pitch fork. Sam will do us too. Just not yet.
It's one of the things I really dislike about providers hyping "inference time scaling" as a concept. Apart from being a blatant misnomer (there's nothing scalable about it), it's so transparently a dial they can manipulate to shape perception. If they want a model to seem more intelligent than it really is, just dial up the "thinking" and burn tokens. Then once you have people fooled, you can dial it down again. Everyone will assume its their own fault that their AI suddenly isn't working properly. And since it's almost entirely unmeasurable you can do it selectively for any given product you want to pitch for any period of time you like and then pull the rug.
We need to force them back into being providers of commodity services and hit this assumption they can mold things in real time on the head.
I have a feeling that Codex is also getting lower limits. Got this email just now. Basically they copy Claude's $100 tier.
> To help you go further with Codex, we’re introducing a new €114 Pro tier designed for longer, high-intensity sessions.
> At launch, this new tier includes a limited-time Codex usage boost, with up to 10x more Codex usage than Plus (typically 5x).
> As the Codex promotion on Plus winds down today, we’re rebalancing Plus usage to support more sessions across the week, rather than longer high-intensity sessions on a single day.
They didnt just lower limits they keep messing with peoples local settings and I wish it would be called out drastically more because it could cause serious issues. A coding agents settings are a contract, even the default ones, if they worked for me for 9 months and now you are changing defaults on me, you shouldnt just force new defaults on me without warning, Claude can and will goof up hard if misconfigured.
Thinking in counterfactuals, how would the hype around Codex would be different if it was organic and because they had built a genuinely good product? Asking as someone who genuinely loves Codex and has been in the OpenAI camp for months after buying a Claude Max plan from November to February.
It's quite likely that OpenAI is running a significant PR campaign to compensate for the bad rep they earned by stepping in to meet the demands of the Trump administration, after Anthropic refused to assist the administration with mass domestic surveillance and development of lethal autonomous weapons. Presumably OpenAI didn't buy the podcast TBPN just because they like the guys.
I really hate this kind of behavior. Yeah, Anthropic may do some bad things, I don't know, but we all see that Anthropic is always one step ahead of OpenAI. And just because Anthropic lowered rates for some people, people now start saying that Codex is way better than Claude Code / Claude Desktop.
Anthropic don't seem to know how to look after and keep customers.
everyone seems to unconditionally love anthropic, but openai has always had the best models… it just requires a bit more effort on behalf of the user to actually leverage it.
> because Anthropic lowered rate limits for individuals due to compute constraints
It's because they don't support OpenCode.
Codex is much worse than Anthropics model. My experience is that I burn 10x the tokens using Codex compared to Sonnet 4.6
There was brief consternation when OpenAI swooped in to snatch up those DoD contracts but then the next model released and all is forgiven.
And hopefully Anthropic has extra capacity then and I can return there.
Uber, but AI!
No it’s because Anthropic can’t message anything to its customers without lying.
Not only that, but anthropic is now forcing users to give their biometric information to palantir
They're doing a slow rollout
Competition is bad? Who cares - let the big players subsidize and compete between each other. That's what we want. We want strong models at a low price, and we'll hype up whoever is doing it.
Simultaneously, we also hype up the open models that are catching up. That are significantly more discounted, that also put pressure on the big players and keep them in check.
People aren't falling for PR; people are encouraging the PR to put pressure on the competition. It's not that hard.