news.ycombinator.com• Jun 3, 2026• 1 min read
Claude Code vs. CodexI have been a long time user of Claude Code. I never felt the need to try other coding tools, and the times I did, I always came back. Across many projects, personal and professional, Claude has been my pair programmer. I have enough experience across generations of Claude models that, just by looking at the output, I can tell when a model switch has happened, strictly in the context of coding tasks. I have noticed models lean on some aspects heavily like bullet points or emojis or markdown tables or ascii diagrams or just a walls of text (4.8). Following the Claude Code 4.7 and 4.8 releases, the performance is immensely worse. Here is how I qualify "worse":1. Coding tasks: they don't follow instructions at all. They consistently miss close to a quarter of the ask, which cascades into bloat over time. 2. Reviewing existing code: they literally fail to read the code or use the tools properly.Both of these have, in my opinion, eroded the time saving value of the tool. Hard opinion: real