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  • Hacker News
  • 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.
    by tunesmith
  • Which models? It is not useful to compare harnesses without this information.
    by ukuina
  • Which models, and at what effort level?
    by NyxWulf
  • Author of the article here.

    Yes, sorry for this. I think I rushed to post that and did not expected to be read by so many people.

    I used Codex TUI on MacOS using `gpt-5.6-sol xhigh` vs Claude Code TUI on MacOS using `opus-5 xhigh`. Of course it was a mixed work with subagents being Sonnet 5 in case of Claude Code and Terra 5.6 and Luna 5.6 in case of Codex.

    by gls2ro
  • I'm still using gpt-5.5 in copilot (visual studio proper) as a "custom" model. It feels like I've been enjoying an ~unpatched exploit while everyone else wallows in the proverbial mud.

    A large part of what pushes developers toward these products appears to be the billing model. Pre-paying for tokens is some kind of ideological red line for a lot of developers. I think this is a strategic error. The subscription models have so many more perverse incentives baked in. Those paying $100/m+ for subscription access are almost certainly getting taken for a ride based upon my experience with prepaid tokens.

    by bob1029
  • > The subscription models have so many more perverse incentives baked in

    Yes. But, as your "so many more" implies, there are also perverse incentives in pay-per-token. And now, for the first time, the companies with the perverse incentives also happen to own the intelligence needed to, ad-nauseam, evade market and customer oversight. Potentially, this is a war where one side can inflict a thousand paper cuts in one second and the humans are on the other side. I think this is going to be an interesting test, a taste if you will, of what AGI means.

    by dsign
  • > Pre-paying for tokens is some kind of ideological red line for a lot of developers.

    If I can get a few subscriptions for 100 - 200 EUR month and NOT have to pay 3000 - 9000 EUR (based on ccusage and some other stats) in tokens then it’s a no brainer for me to do that.

    I don’t get why paying per token would be better if it’s economically disadvantageous.

    by KronisLV
  • > Those paying $100/m+ for subscription access are almost certainly getting taken for a ride based upon my experience with prepaid tokens.

    I don't understand what this means. Are they overpaying and getting less? Typically "taken for a ride" means, exactly "The seller got more out of the deal than usual sellers would".

    Buying a burger for $3000 == "taken for a ride".

    Paying $30 for all you can eat != "taken for a ride".

    by lelanthran
  • I’ve been experimenting with this for a while, and right now I’m using Luna xhigh as my default. Previously I was using Sol medium.

    Sol medium is a great balance between speed and being thorough, but it’s quite expensive. Luna xhigh seems to compensate for slightly lower intelligence by thinking and reasoning for longer, so tasks can take more time to complete. But it’s crazy cheap.

    I also have some custom evals using promptfoo to make sure I’m not introducing regressions when switching models. So far, Luna xhigh has been really, really good for the price.

    Don’t sleep on it. Give Luna a try.

    by azuanrb
  • I’ve been getting good results from using Sol for planning and Luna for everything else. At current rates it barely scratches my weekly quota.

    Makes me wonder if the current Luna prices are sustainable.

    by cageface
  • 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.

    by mewse-hn
  • Model performance is very much subjective to what you’re using it for. I’m a PM and doing mostly knowledge work, and I’ve been really happy with Opus 5 as my daily driver with very good results, perhaps my favorite anthropic model so far. I do a lot of front-end coding with it too. I prefer it over the openAI models, been switching frequently. Kimi K3 is great too.
    by kromokromo
  • On the flip side, I've been using Fable to statically recompile a game binary from a system that's never been emulated to modern C++ while also keeping the code clean, maintainable, and portable and it's been a dream. I'm in awe of how fast Fable is able to bring a 20 year old game that's largely been lost to the sands of time to SDL3. It finished the recomp in about 3 hours. The next day has been fully rewriting the functions to remove old hardware-specific quirks and then rewriting large swaths into multiple classes, subsystems, building tests, etc. Tomorrow I'm going to add mod support and then experiment with a random platform like making a Switch build of the game.

    It's expensive but it's doing in hours what no one's done in 2 decades.

    by smith7018
  • > 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?

    by Kovah
  • I have the same experience. I have passed Codex's code over to Claude (Sonnet mostly) to simplify it and it did a so much better job. Codex couldn't comprehend a simpler solution no matter what.
    by smusamashah
  • I find myself in an awkward tug of war between Claude and Codex. Claude is the buggiest product, always breaking in bizarre and aggravating ways. Codex is much more polished, especially on mobile.

    However the main thing that's prevented me from adopting Codex full time is its poor implementation of plan mode. While Claude persists it to disk and re-reads it in full on compaction, Codex's just lives in context, so it basically immediately gets destroyed when compacted - which happens a lot, given Codex doesn't default to 1M context window.

    by dbbk
  • I ask it just to make a plan file
    by tnchr
  • Are you using the desktop verion? The CLi is very robust, but these days it just feels crazy slow to me.
    by freepiai
  • Summer 2026 meta (well, mine):

    Sol is for routine work, Opus for frontend/design, and Fable for more complex / ambiguous / architecture work. Fable works extremely well to drive Sol as a subagent.

    Fable is the only one you can actually trust to not look at the code, but Sol is somehow still more pleasant to work with, especially in fast mode. Opus is the enemy, and it will make you insane if you talk to it for too long.

    by piazz
  • > Fable works extremely well to drive Sol as a subagent.

    Curious what method you like for doing this? I've tried a few options and I haven't found one I'm happy with yet.

    by moozilla
  • Im trying to do my part in the world here.

    This post needs an edit. Author is not comparing "Codex" and "Claude". They are comparing Codex TUI/CLI with (presumably) gpt-5.6-sol, against Claude Code TUI/CLI with (presumably) Claude-Opus-5.

    Ctrl + f > [5.6, sol, sonnet, opus or fable] yields no results.

    "Claude" is a product family, which includes Models, and Harnesses (and probably more). "Claude code" covers both the Claude Code TUI, and CC in the Claude desktop app.

    "Codex" is the same, and could refer to the Codex TUI, or Codex in the ChatGPT (formerly codex) desktop app. (And well, historically, gpt-5.*-codex.)

    Hearing "Yea Claude is great for coding" takes an hour off my life.

    Something something "Honey why don't you finish up with your Nintendo and come to dinner?"

    by agentdev001
  • i was going to respond to you with a snarky holier-than-thou remark but then read the article and holy cow, nothing is specified at all…

    really feels like discussion spawns only off post title and as a second or third order effect, post content

    by asa123
  • Author of the article here.

    Yes, sorry for this. I think I rushed to post that and did not expected to be read by so many people.

    I used Codex TUI on MacOS using `gpt-5.6-sol xhigh` vs Claude Code TUI on MacOS using `opus-5 xhigh`. Of course it was a mixed work with subagents being Sonnet 5 in case of Claude Code and Terra 5.6 and Luna 5.6 in case of Codex.

    by gls2ro
  • > Codex feels more like a version of Data from Star Trek

    Great analogy for some reason. At fist I felt Codex Sol was a bit more cold. But now that I've worked with it for several weeks it has grown on me, even shown some personality. I appreciate that it is a bit more business-like, Fable is a bit too friendly sometimes when it ought to be focused on work. Codex can be a bit more nit-picky.

    I agree with most of his other observations. I've already started to bin tasks based on which model I feel is best suited. In general, for well scoped and straight ahead tasks where banging out code is what I want I reach for Codex. For less specced tasks where I need a broader view and want the model to fill in more details I reach for Fable.

    Both are great and they make a good team together.

    by stillpointlab
  • 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!

    by 217
  • Gemini 3.7 may have fast token output but holy cow does it waste it on useless output. Several times now I've given it a shot and watched it's reasoning trace go through a bunch of unnecessary / off-target steps relative to what I asked. Don't have this issue with 5.6 models. MAI Code 1.1 is also solid and fast for non-complex tasks.
    by totalhack
  • I've been using all the SOTA models a lot at work, like serious amount of tokens. It's been really rare that I stick with one model and harness for too long... Except a month ago I started testing Kimi K3 and omp and I never went back.

    Something with this combo works really well for Rust dev. The model doesn't really annoy me at all and I have not switched to Opus or SOL. And the monthly token bill is much lower...

    by pimeys
  • > gemini 3.7 is great for speed

    Does this mean it can break your code faster now, or have they actually worked on making it good? Every single time I've given Gemini a chance (in older point versions) it would almost immediately break something and throw itself into a loop. I have not experienced it being useful for programming and almost never heard an account of somebody else doing so.

    Remember those stories of LLMs catastrophically deleting entire repositories or databases? It was always Gemini.

    I'm amazed that you'd trust Gemini over DeepSeek, which I've had very good experiences with after some tuning, though still on a relatively short leash.

    by solarkraft
  • I think harness/model pairs matter more than your analysis lets on.

    I've had great luck with the ds flash v4, paired with prime-agent for the harness--I like the results a lot. And you get to see thinking tokens.

    I haven't liked the model as much in opencode.

    Sol & luna have been great everywhere. sol plans, luna builds.

    by sejje
  • Unfortunately the codex plans don’t offer the same amount of tokens as they did before. This changed around a week ago. There’s been a lot of user reports noticing this issue, and I’ve noticed the same pattern on my account. Previously I would never reach my weekly quota but last week I managed to finish it it one day. Same project, same single session sequential work. Not sure if there’s an issue or if it’s on purpose, and not even sure it applied to all accounts. Curious if other users on HN noticed the same problem.
    by lifty