Same, I find Codex not good to be honest. I have better success manually copy/pasting into GPT5 chat. There's something about Codex that just wants to change everything and use the weirdest tool commands.
It also often fails to escalate a command, it'll even be like, oh well I'm in a sandbox so I guess I can't do this, and will just not do it and try to find a workaround instead of escalating permission to do the command.
The last time I used them both side by side was a month ago, so unless its significantly improved in the past month, I am genuinely surprised that someone is making the argument that Codex is competitive with ClaudeCode, let alone it somehow being superior.
ClaudeCode is used by me almost daily, and it continues to blow me away. I don't use Codex often because every time I have used it, the output is next to worthless and generally invalid. Even if it does get me what I eventually want, it will take much more prompting for me to get the functioning result. ClaudeCode on the other hand gets me good code from the initial prompt. I'm continually surprised at exactly how little prompting it requires. I have given it challenges with very vague prompts where it really exceeds my expectations.
I think the enthusiasm for Codex coincided with the extended period of degraded quality CC was experiencing around a couple of months ago? During that time I cancelled my Claude sub and tried out Codex, which by comparison was feeling significantly better. I haven't tried them out side by side since Claude has been de-borked but even if Codex is objectively poorer I could believe that flattering comparison has stuck for people who switched?
I use both but I agree that they are generally not on par. I find Claude Code does a better job and doesn't overengineer as much. Where sometime Codex does better is in debugging a tough bug that stumps Claude Code. Codex is also more likely to get lazy and claiming to have finished a large task, when it reality it just wrote some placeholder lines. Claude has never done that. They might be on par soon, however, and I think Anthropic is playing a dangerous game with their limit enforcement on people who are on subscriptions.
Me too, but I know it's not just people shilling, or on the take, because a bunch of people I know personally have moved from Claude Code to Codex, and say it's better.
For me, though, it's not remotely close. Codex has fucked up 95% of the 50-or-so tasks I asked it to do, while Claude Code fucks up only maybe 60%.
I'm big on asking LLMs to do the first major step of something, and then coming back later, and if it looks like it kinda sucks, just Ctrl-C and git revert that container/folder. And I also explicitly set up "here are the commands you need to run to self-check your work" every time. (Which Codex somewhat weirdly sometimes ignores with the explicit (false) claim that it skipped that step because it wasn't requested... hmm.)
So, those kinds of workflow preferences might be a factor, but I haven't seen Codex ever be good yet, and I regret the time I invested trying it too early.
Its very odd because I was hoping they were very on par.