Reddit Sentiment: Codex Beats Claude Code, but Claude Wins on Speed and UX

Reddit sentiment strongly favors Codex over Claude Code: 65.3% of direct comparisons and 79.9% of upvote-weighted sentiment prefer Codex. Topic-wise, Codex leads on most capability metrics, while Claude Code wins on speed and workflow UX, and garners about 4x the discussion volume. A budget-friendly GLM appears as a new contender; the author uses Claude Code for speed but acknowledges Codex’s superior problem-solving.

Key Points

Codex is preferred in 65.3% of direct comparisons; when upvote-weighted, 79.9% of sentiment favors Codex.
Claude Code dominates discussion volume (~4x Codex) and leads on speed and workflows/UX, while Codex wins most capability categories.
Both tools receive more negative than positive non-comparative comments, reflecting Reddit’s general negativity bias.
GLM emerges as a value-focused dark horse: cheaper, decent results, but less capable agentically than Codex or Claude.
Methodology used Claude Haiku for per-comment sentiment with full context; 500 comments cost ~$0.77 and ~27 minutes; future work includes more data and model comparisons.

Sentiment

The overall sentiment of the Hacker News discussion is largely corroborative of the article's findings, particularly regarding Codex's superior performance for complex or accuracy-critical tasks. However, it also adds significant nuance, emphasizing that Claude Code's speed and iterative nature make it a strong contender and often a preferred daily driver for other types of tasks and workflows. The discussion suggests a more balanced reality of complementary tools with different strengths for different use cases and user preferences, rather than a definitive "Codex is unequivocally better" conclusion.

In Agreement

Codex (GPT5-Codex/Codex-CLI) is often superior in terms of correctness and delivering more complete, less 'half-baked' solutions, even if it is slower. Users prefer waiting longer for a correct result.
Codex excels in specific scenarios like executing well-articulated plans, finding complex bugs, tweaking intricate logic, and reasoning about long-range context.
Codex has more generous usage limits, contributing to its perceived lead in 'pricing' as noted in the article.
The Codex PR reviewer is considered the best among available tools.
All current AI coding environments are still very immature, with many improvements yet to be unlocked.

Opposed

The differences between Claude and Codex models can often be minor, and the choice between them frequently comes down to personal preference or user familiarity.
Claude Code's speed, fast iteration, and immediate feedback are crucial for daily workflows, pair programming, non-coding CLI/git operations, and architectural discussions, leading to its preference for 80% of use cases for some users, especially in enterprise contexts where cost is not a primary concern.
Claude can effectively handle larger, parallelizable tasks by orchestrating sub-agents, challenging the notion that Codex is uniquely better for 'tougher, longer-running' tasks.
Codex's 'agentic' strengths might be more ideally suited for solo developers building greenfield projects ('building in public') rather than being universally practical for typical enterprise development contexts.