Codex is missing a few things that Claude code has had for some time like defined plugin subagents and a few other things. But overall it’s fairly capable. The biggest gripe I have is that codex really restricts context window sizes and compaction leads to a lot of grounding work, and overall codex GPT is too literal in many situations - it’s follows direction slavishly, and when subagent reviewers are used, they tend to find increasingly obscure “flaws” on the instruction following impetus, and the harness agent takes them literally as issues to fix even when it leads to bizarre outcomes. For instance I’ve had several runs where it tries to end up building a hermetic system with sha hashing of everything (including operating system binaries and kernels, tool chains, etc) to certify test results are valid, etc. I have to sort of watch it carefully to be sure it’s not drifting into some insane yak shaving corner, which it will happily do for weeks on end.

Claude has the exact opposite problem, especially opus-5, where I literally can’t trust it to print hello world without taking a shortcut, or just simply lying and saying it printed it when it didn’t, behind a giant wall of inscrutable text. I find it very ironic that Anthropic is the vendor of the lazy lying cheating model that does almost everything you tell it to it do.

I’d really kill for something that balances instruction following and loop escaping behavior better. Fable 5.1 does seem a lot better, feeling more like 4.6 behavior, and honestly Sol has improved as well. I’m pretty psyched for the next generation, as I think the competition has heated up so much that things will improve really fast to the point of marginal utility opportunity being increasingly close to epsilon.