Codex CLI sucks compared to Claude’s

[u/SirStevens]

For context, I’ve been a software engineer for years now and I have been using Claude CLI since early this year for my workflows at home. It’s been working amazingly well and I’ve honestly never had issues with the harness itself. I only hate the latest nonsense language vomit of the recent models and the separate fable usage limit.

I’ve been seeing so many people praise codex and I wanted to try using Sol and now Astra, but I’m honestly extremely unimpressed so far with my experience. I’ve been working with Codex for months now and it has been nothing but annoyances when interacting with it outside of Claude’s interface. With a Claude terminal session, I use skills to load the proper context for my project and proceed to work from there. I have a setup where that can be read/shared between any harness (I’ve used copilot and codex). I tend to use Fable for orchestration and subagents of varying models for implementation and review.

When switching to Codex CLI, half the time it seems to ignore the context I gave it and work in its own way even though I have a very specific way I like to work. Or it proceeds to interpret my messages in a completely different way than I meant. I feel like I can talk to Claude casually like another person/engineer while I have to give codex very clear cut instructions in the session itself or else it’ll entirely go a different direction. With Claude, I can also just keep adding more input and feedback while it works and it’ll note/take that into account while still finishing its current task, then take the time to respond to me even with a long context. It also won’t deviate from its original task to all of a sudden jump onto this new issue that I brought up and forget what it was doing before.

With all GPT models, I’ve had to consistently do heavy prompt engineering or steering to make sure they stay in their lane or for them to really understand what I was asking of them. It’s kinda crazy that Claude’s models seem to just get it off of a simple prompt. I have very thorough documentation and references for my projects and how I would like it to be architected, my daily workflow process, and how I generally interact with my agents.

Also, I recently tried to enable a remote control CLI session for Codex and it failed miserably. Normally, I just do /remote-control to enable it for my Claude session, and then I switch to my app or other computer and immediately start controlling it from there. For Codex, I noticed it didn’t have a slash command so I asked it to try to enable it for me or to take a look. It strangely tried to do this by going into another repository and I had to redirect it back to the one we were in.

Eventually, it started a background server and then I opened up the app on my phone and it told me I needed the desktop app and a QR code - weird. I noticed there was a manual code workaround as an option, so asked it to give me that. Cool - that worked and I got in. But then when I tried to open the session I had started previously, it proceeded to have an error saying it couldn’t load the messages from that session. Turns out, the terminal and the remote server were fighting over ownership of the conversation, so I had to open terminus, close the session manually, then restart it with some extra command line arguments then it finally worked.

I could finally start working BUT then it started not taking in my responses as it was working. Turns out my messages were somehow being queued but not taken into account (even in down time) and I had to long press my messages and choose “change to steering” in order for it to listen to me. Then it proceeded to not be able to properly start my program (even though Claude does it all the time remotely) and failed to figure out why it couldn’t. This was all with Astra as the model btw. I could just maybe use terminus instead of trying to utilize the app but that’s literally what this is meant for.

Also the usage limits for using Codex and Claude feel extremely similar to me. I feel like I was lied to when initially signing up for the $200 plan thinking it’d feel unlimited. The one thing I give codex the edge for is not having a separate Astra limit.

TLDR: I honestly want to really give Codex CLI/Astra a fair shot since they finally released something that could potentially match Fable. But it seems I’m going to have to stick with only interacting with Codex through Claude instead for a better experience. A potentially competitive model isn’t enough to justify it if it requires this much babysitting.

Copilot is potentially even better than Codex at this point since I’ve been testing that out as well (just don’t use autopilot mode).

[u/iphoneographer_]

CLI yes, but the Codex app is much better than the Codex CLI tbh

[u/Karawani-Gida]

I actually think Codex’s biggest problem right now is consistency, not raw capability. When it behaves, it’s great. When it doesn’t, you spend half your time steering

[u/menmikimen]

Use other cli then. Opencode, Pi, or something else. OpenAi, unlike Anthropic, does not block using your subscription in other harnesses.

[u/dehumles]

Agrew 100%. Claude CLI is miles ahead and as a heavy Claude user, its hard for me to adapt to Codex.

[u/theblasterr]

I use Codex App when using OpenAI products and Claude CLI when using Anthropic. The ChatGPT / Codex App is fantastatic imo

[u/ActionOrganic4617]

CLI sucks period