GPT-5.2-Codex
openai.com475 points by meetpateltech 15 hours ago
475 points by meetpateltech 15 hours ago
If anyone from OpenAI is reading this -- a plea to not screw with the reasoning capabilities!
Codex is so so good at finding bugs and little inconsistencies, it's astounding to me. Where Claude Code is good at "raw coding", Codex/GPT5.x are unbeatable in terms of careful, methodical finding of "problems" (be it in code, or in math).
Yes, it takes longer (quality, not speed please!) -- but the things that it finds consistently astound me.
Piggybacking on this post. Codex is not only finding much higher quality issues, it’s also writing code that usually doesn’t leave quality issues behind. Claude is much faster but it definitely leaves serious quality issues behind.
So much so that now I rely completely on Codex for code reviews and actual coding. I will pick higher quality over speed every day. Please don’t change it, OpenAI team!
Every plan Opus creates in Planning mode gets run through ChatGPT 5.2. It catches at least 3 or 4 serious issues that Claude didn’t think of. It typically takes 2 or 3 back and fourths for Claude to ultimately get it right.
I’m in Claude Code so often (x20 Max) and I’m so comfortable with my environment setup with hooks (for guardrails and context) that I haven’t given Codex a serious shot yet.
The same thing can be said about Opus running through Opus.
It's often not that a different model is better (well, it still has to be a good model). It's that the different chat has a different objective - and will identify different things.
My (admittedly one person's anecdotal) experience has been that when I ask Codex and Claude to make a plan/fix and then ask them both to review it, they both agree that Codex's version is better quality. This is on a 140K LOC codebase with an unreasonable amount of time spent on rules (lint, format, commit, etc), on specifying coding patterns, on documenting per workspace README.md, etc.
I think the issue is for them "quality, not speed" means "expensive, not cheap" and they can't pass that extra cost on to customers
> they can't pass that extra cost on to customers
I don't understand why not. People pay for quality all the time, and often they're begging to pay for quality, it's just not an option. Of course, it depends on how much more quality is being offered, but it sounds like a significant amount here.
I'm happy to pay the same right now for less (on the max plan, or whatever) -- because I'm never running into limits, and I'm running these models near all day every day (as a single user working on my own personal projects).
I consistently run into limits with CC (Opus 4.5) -- but even though Codex seems to be spending significantly more tokens, it just seems like the quota limit is much higher?
I am on the $20 plan for CC and Codex, I feel like a session of usage on CC == ~20% Codex usage / 5 hours in terms of time spent inferencing. It has always seemed way more geneous than I would expect.
Agreed. The $20 plans can go very far when you're using the coding agent as an additional tool in your development flow, not just trying to hammer it with prompts until you get output that works.
Managing context goes a long way, too. I clear context for every new task and keep the local context files up to date with key info to get the LLM on target quickly
> I clear context for every new task and keep the local context files up to date with key info to get the LLM on target quickly
Aggressively recreating your context is still the best way to get the best results from these tools too, so it has a secondary benefit.
It is ironic that in the gpt-4 era, when we couldn't see much value in this tools, all we could hear was "skill issues", "prompt engineering skills". Now they are actually quite capable for SOME tasks, specially for something that we don't really care about learning, and they, to a certain extent, can generalize. They perform much better than in gpt-4 era, objectively, across all domains. They perform much better with the absolute minimum input, objectively, across all domains. If someone skipped the whole "prompt engineering" and learned nothing during that time, this person is more equiped to perform well. Now I wonder how much I am leaving behind by ignoring this whole "skills, tools, MCP this and that, yada yada".
Prompt engineering (communicating with models?) is a foundational skill. Skills, tools, MCPs, etc. are all built on prompts.
My take is that the overlap is strongest with engineering management. If you can learn how to manage a team of human engineers well, that translates to managing a team of agents well.
Minimal prompting yielding better results? I haven't found this to be the case at all.
Any thoughts on your wondering? I too am wondering about the same mistake I might be making.
do you mean running /compact often?
I'm not who you asked, but i do the same thing, i keep important state in doc files and recreate sessions from that state. this allows me to clear context and reconstruct my status on that item. I have a skill that manages this
Using documents for state helps so much with adding guardrails.
I do wish that ChatGPT had a toggle next to each project file instead of having to delete and reupload to toggle or create separate projects for various combinations of files.
I noticed I am not hitting limits either. My guess is OpenAI sees CC as a real competitor/serious threat. Had OAI not given me virtually unlimited use I probably would have jumped ship to CC by now. Burning tons of cash at this stage is likely Very Worth It to maintain "market leader" status if only in the eyes of the media/investors. It's going to be real hard to claw back current usage limits though.
If you look at benchmarks, the Claude models score significantly higher intelligence per token. I'm not sure how that works exactly, but they are offset from the entire rest of the chart on that metric. It seems they need less tokens to get the same result. (I can't speak for how that affects performance on very difficult tasks though, since most of mine are pretty straightforward.)
So if you look at the total cost of running the benchmark, it's surprisingly similar to other models -- the higher price per token is offset by the significantly fewer tokens required to complete a task.
See "Cost to Run Artificial Analysis Index" and "Intelligence vs Output Tokens" here
https://artificialanalysis.ai/
...With the obligatory caveat that benchmarks are largely irrelevant for actual real world tasks and you need to test the thing on your actual task to see how well it does!
I wonder how much their revenue really ends up contributes towards covering their costs.
In my mind, they're hardly making any money compared to how much they're spending, and are relying on future modeling and efficiency gains to be able to reduce their costs but are pursuing user growth and engagement almost fully -- the more queries they get, the more data they get, the bigger a data moat they can build.
Inference is almost certainly very profitable.
All the money they keep raising goes to R&D for the next model. But I don't see how they ever get off that treadmill.
Is there a possible future where the inference usage increases because there will be many many more customers and R&D grows Lower than inference?
Or is it already saturated?
"In my mind, they're hardly making any money compared to how much they're spending"
everyone seems to assume this, but its not like its a company run by dummies, or has dummy investors.
They are obviously making awful lot of revenue.
>> "In my mind, they're hardly making any money compared to how much they're spending"
> everyone seems to assume this, but its not like its a company run by dummies, or has dummy investors.
It has nothing to do with their management or investors being "dummies" but the numbers are the numbers.
OpenAI has data center rental costs approaching $620 billion, which is expected to rise to $1.4 trillion by 2033.
Annualized revenue is expected to be "only" $20 billion this year.
$1.4 trillion is 70x current revenue.
So unless they execute their strategy perfectly, hit all of their projections and hoping that neither the stock market or economy collapses, making a profit in the foreseeable future is highly unlikely.
[1]: "OpenAI's AI money pit looks much deeper than we thought. Here's my opinion on why this matters" - https://diginomica.com/openais-ai-money-pit-much-deeper-we-t...
To me it seems that they're banking on it becoming indispensable. Right now I could go back to pre-AI and be a little disappointed but otherwise fine. I figure all of these AI companies are in a race to make themselves part of everyone's core workflow in life, like clothing or a smart phone, such that we don't have much of a choice as to whether we use it or not - it just IS.
That's what the investors are chasing, in my opinion.
It'll never be literally indispensible, because open models exist - either served by third-party providers, or even ran locally in a homelab setup. A nice thing that's arguably unique about the latter is that you can trade scale for latency - you get to run much larger models on the same hardware if they can chug on the answer overnight (with offload to fast SSD for bulk storage of parameters and activations) instead of just answering on the spot. Large providers don't want to do this, because keeping your query's activations around is just too expensive when scaled to many users.
Revenue != profit.
They are drowning in debt and go into more and more ridiculous schemes to raise/get more money.
--- start quote ---
OpenAI has made $1.4 trillion in commitments to procure the energy and computing power it needs to fuel its operations in the future. But it has previously disclosed that it expects to make only $20 billion in revenues this year. And a recent analysis by HSBC concluded that even if the company is making more than $200 billion by 2030, it will still need to find a further $207 billion in funding to stay in business.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-partners-carrying-96-b...
--- end quote ---
Exactly. This is why the workflow of consulting Gemini/Codex for architecture and overall plan, and then have Claude implement the changes is so powerful.
Second this but for the chat subscription. Whatever they did with 5.2 compared to 5.0 in ChatGPT increased the test-time compute and the quality shows. If only they would allow more tokens to be submitted in one prompt (it's currently capped at 46k for Plus). I don't touch Gemini 3.0 Pro now (am also subbed there) unless I need the context length.
I use it mainly for embedded programming and I find codex way better than claude. I don't my the delay anyway I'm slower to code carefully crafted C
Do you think that for someone who only needs careful, methodical identification of “problems” occasionally, like a couple of times per day, the $20/month plan gets you anywhere, or do you need the $200 plan just to get access to this?
I've had the $20/month plan for a few months alongside a max subscription to Claude; the cheap codex plan goes a really long way. I use it a few times a day for debugging, finding bugs, and reviewing my work. I've ran out of usage a couple of times, but only when I lean on it way more than I should.
I only ever use it on the high reasoning mode, for what it's worth. I'm sure it's even less of a problem if you turn it down.
$200 on claude for vibe coding, $20 on codex for code review and "brainstorming". I use other LLM for a 2nd - 3rd - 4th opinion.
The $20 does this fine.
The OpenAI token limits seem more generous than the Anthropic ones too.
Listening to Dario at the NYT DealBook summit, and reading between the lines a bit, it seems like he is basically saying Anthropic is trying to be a reponsible, sustainable business and charging customers accordingly, and insinuating that OpenAI is being much more reckless, financially.
I think it's difficult to estimate how profitable both are - depends too much on usage and that varies so much.
I think it is widely accepted that Anthropic is doing very well in enterprise adoption of Claude Code.
In most of those cases that is paid via API key not by subscription so the business model works differently - it doesn't rely on low usage users subsidizing high usage users.
OTOH OpenAI is way ahead on consumer usage - which also includes Codex even if most consumers don't use it.
I don't think it matters - just make use of the best model at the best price. At the moment Codex 5.2 seems best at the mid-price range, while Opus seems slightly stronger than Codex Max (but too expensive to use for many things).
absolutely second this. I'm mainly a claude code user, but i have codex running in another tab and for code reviews and it's absolutely killer at analyzing flows and finding subtle bugs.
Have you tried Claude Code in the second tab instead, that would be a fair comparison.
It's annoying though because it keeps (accurately) pointing out critical memory bugs that I clearly need to fix rather than pretending they aren't there. It's slowing me down.
Love it when it circles around a minor issue that I clearly described as temporary hack instead of recognizing the tremendously large gaping hole in my implementation right next to it.
Anecdotally I've found it very good in the exact same case for multi-agent workflows - as the "reviewer"
Interesting what I've seen is it spins and thinks forever. Then just breaks. Which is beyond frustrating.
If by "just breaks" means "refuses to write code / gives up or reverts what it does" -- yes, I've experienced that.
Experiencing that repeatedly motivated me to use it as a reviewer (which another commenter noted), a role which it is (from my experience) very good at.
I basically use it to drive Claude Code, which will nuke the codebase with abandon.
I've seen it think for a long time and then just timeout or something? It just stops and nothing happens.
Ive had the same but i only use it through zed so I wasnt sure if it was a codex issue or a zed issue
Agreed, I'm surprised how much much care the "extra high" reasoning allows. It easily catches bugs in code other LLMs won't, using it to review Opus 4.5 is highly effective.
Agree. Codex just read my source code for a toy lisp I wrote in ARM64 assembly and learned how to code in that lisp and wrote a few demo programs for me. The was impressive enough. Then it spent some time and effort to really hunt down some problems--there was a single bit mask error in my garbage collector that wasn't showing up until then. I was blown away. It's the kind of thing I would have spent forever trying to figure out before.
I've been writing a little port of the SeL4 OS kernel to rust, mostly as a learning exercise. I ran into a weird bug yesterday where some of my code wasn't running - qemu was just exiting. And I couldn't figure out why.
I asked codex to take a look. It took a couple minutes, but it managed to track the issue down using a bunch of tricks I've never seen before. I was blown away. In particular, it reran qemu with different flags to get more information about a CPU fault I couldn't see. Then got a hex code of the instruction pointer at the time of the fault, and used some tools I didn't know about to map that pointer to the lines of code which were causing the problem. Then took a read of that part of the code and guessed (correctly) what the issue was. I guess I haven't worked with operating systems much, so I haven't seen any of those tricks before. But, holy cow!
Its tempting to just accept the help and move on, but today I want to go through what it did in detail, including all the tools it used, so I can learn to do the same thing myself next time.
Maybe you're a garbage programmer and that error was too obvious. Interesting observation, though.
edit: username joke, don't get me banned
> If anyone from OpenAI is reading this
(unrelated, but piggybacking on requests to reach the teams)
If anyone from OpenAI or Google is reading this, please continue to make your image editing models work with the "previz-to-render" workflow.
Image edits should strongly infer pose and blocking as an internal ControlNet, but should be able to upscale low-fidelity mannequins, cutouts, and plates/billboards.
OpenAI kicks ass at this (but could do better with style controls - if I give a Midjourney style ref, use it) :
https://imgur.com/gallery/previz-to-image-gpt-image-1-x8t1ij...
https://imgur.com/a/previz-to-image-gpt-image-1-5-3fq042U
Google fails the tests currently, but can probably easily catch up :
I was very skeptical about Codex at the beginning, but now all my coding tasks start with Codex. It's not perfect at everything, but overall it's pretty amazing. Refactoring, building something new, building something I'm not familiar with. It is still not great at debugging things.
One surprising thing that codex helped with is procrastination. I'm sure many people had this feeling when you have some big task and you don't quite know where to start. Just send it to Codex. It might not get it right, but it's almost always good starting point that you can quickly iterate on.
Infinitely agree with all. I was skeptical, and then tried Opus 4.5 and was blown away. Codex with 5.0 and 5.1 wasn't great, but 5.2 is big improvement. I can't do code without it because there's no point. Time and quality with the right constraints, you're going to get better code.
And same thought with both procrastination because of not knowing where to start, but also getting stuck in the middle and not knowing where to go. Literally never happens anymore. Having discussions with it for doing the planning and different options for implementations, and you get to the end with a good design description and then, what's the point of writing the code yourself when with that design, it's going to write it quickly and matching the agreements.
You can code without it. Maybe you don't want to, but if you're a programmer, you can
(here I am remembering a time I had no computer and would program data structures in OCaml with pen and paper, then would go to university the next day to try it. Often times it worked the first try)
Sure, but the end of this post [0] is where I'm at. I don't feel the need or want to write the code when I can spend my time doing the other parts that are much more interesting and valuable.
> Emil concluded his article like this:
> JustHTML is about 3,000 lines of Python with 8,500+ tests passing. I couldn’t have written it this quickly without the agent. > But “quickly” doesn’t mean “without thinking.” I spent a lot of time reviewing code, making design decisions, and steering the agent in the right direction. The agent did the typing; I did the thinking. > That’s probably the right division of labor.
>I couldn’t agree more. Coding agents replace the part of my job that involves typing the code into a computer. I find what’s left to be a much more valuable use of my time.
But are those tests relevant? I tried using LLMs to write tests at work and whenever I review them I end up asking it “Ok great, passes the test, but is the test relevant? Does it test anything useful?” And I get a “Oh yeah, you’re right, this test is pointless”
We fixed this at work by instructing it to maximize coverage with minimal tests, which is closer to our coding style.
Those tests were written by people. That's why they were confident that what the LLM implemented was correct.
Keep track of test coverage and ask it to delete tests without lowering coverage by more than let’s say 0.01 percent points. If you have a script that gives it only the test coverage, and a file with all tests including line number ranges, it is more or less a dumb task it can work on for hours, without actually reading the files (which would fill context too quickly).
That does not work as advertised.
If you leave an agent for hours trying to increase coverage by percentage without further guiding instructions you will end up with lots of garbage.
In order to achieve this, you need several distinct loops. One that creates tests (there will be garbage), one that consolidates redundant tests, one that parametrizes repetitive tests, and so on.
Agents create redundant tests for all sorts of reasons. Maybe they're trying a hard to reach line and leave several attempts behind. Or maybe they "get creative" and try to guess what is uncovered instead of actually following the coverage report, etc.
Less capable models are actually better at doing this. They're faster, don't "get creative" with weird ideas mid-task and cost less. Just make them work one test at the time. Spawn, do one test that verifiably increases overall coverage, exit. Once you reach a treshold, start the consolidating loop: pick a redundant pair of tests, consolidate, exit. And so on...
Of course, you can use a powerful model and babysit it as well. A few disambiguating questions and interruptions will guide them well. If you want true unattended though, it's damn hard to get stable results.
It's the semantics of "can", where it is used to suggest feasibility. When I moved and got a new commute, I still "could" bike to work, but it went from 30min to an hour and a half each way. While technically possible, I would have had to sacrifice a lot when losing two hours a day- laundry, cooking dinner, downtime. I always said I "can't really" bike to work, but there is a lot of context lost.
"Can" is too overloaded a word even with context provided, ranging from places like "could conceivably be achieved" to "usually possible".
The only hint you can dig out is where they might have limits feasibility around it. E.g. "I can fly first class all the time (if I limit the number of flights and spend an unreasonable portion of my weath on tickets)" is typically less useful an interpretation than "I can fly first class all the time (frequently without concern, because I'm very well off)", but you have to figure out which they are trying to say (which isn't always easy).
I can't without seriously sacrificing productivity. (I've been coding for 30 years.)
> It is still not great at debugging things.
It's so fascinating to me that the thread above this one on this page says the opposite, and the funniest thing is I'm sure you're both right. What a wild world we live in, I'm not sure how one is supposed to objectively analyse the performance of these things
Give them real world problems you're encountering and see which can solve them the best, if at all
A full week of that should give you a pretty good idea
Maybe some models just suit particular styles of prompting that do or don't match what you're doing
It's great at some things, and it's awful at other things. And this varies tremendously based on context.
This is very similar to how humans behave. Most people are great a small number of things, and there's always a larger set of things that we may individually be pretty terrible at.
The bots the same way, except: Instead of billions of people who each have their own skillsets and personalities, we've got a small handful of distinct bots from different companies.
And of course: Lies.
When we ask Bob or Lisa help with a thing that they don't understand very well, they usually will try to set reasonable expectations . ("Sorry, ssl-3, I don't really understand ZFS very well. I can try to get the SLOG -- whatever that is -- to work better with this workload, but I can't promise anything.")
Bob or Lisa may figure it out. They'll gather up some background and work on it, bring in outside help if that's useful, and probably tread lightly. This will take time. But they probably won't deliberately lie [much] about what they expect from themselves.
But when the bot is asked to do a thing that it doesn't understand very well, it's chipper as fuck about it. ("Oh yeah! Why sure I can do that! I'm well-versed in -everything-! [Just hold my beer and watch this!]")
The bot will then set forth to do the thing. It might fuck it all up with wild abandon, but it doesn't care: It doesn't feel. It doesn't understand expectations. Or cost. Or art. Or unintended consequences.
Or, it might get it right. Sometimes, amazingly-right.
But it's impossible to tell going in whether it's going to be good, or bad: Unlike Bob or Lisa, the bot always heads into a problem as an overly-ambitious pack of lies.
(But the bot is very inexpensive to employ compared to Bob or Lisa, so we use the bot sometimes.)
Same actually. Though, for some reasons Codex utterly falls down with podman, especially rootless podman. No matter how many explicit instructions I give it in the prompt and AGENTS.md, it will try to set a ton of variables and break podman. It will then try use docker (again despite explicit instructions not too) and eventually will try to sudo podman. One time I actually let it, and it reused its sudo perms to reconfigure selinux on my system, which completely broke it so that I could no longer get root on my own machine and the machine never booted again (because selinux was blocking everything). It has tried to do the same thing three times now on different projects.
So yeah, I use codex a lot and like it, but it has some really bad blind spots.
> One surprising thing that codex helped with is procrastination.
Heh. It's about the same as an efficient compilation or integration testing process that is long enough to let it do it's thing while you go and browse Hacker News.
IMHO, making feedback loops faster is going to be key to improving success rates with agentic coding tools. They work best if the feedback loop is fast and thorough. So compilers, good tests, etc. are important. But it's also important that that all runs quickly. It's almost an even split between reasoning and tool invocations for me. And it is rather trigger happy with the tool invocations. Wasting a lot of time to find out that a naive approach was indeed naive before fixing it in several iterations. Good instructions help (Agents.md).
Focusing attention on just making builds fast and solid is a good investment in any case. Doubly so if you plan on using agentic coding tools.
On the contrary, I will always use longer feedback cycle agents if the quality is better (including consulting 5.2 Pro as oracle or for spec work).
The key is to adapt to this by learning how to parallelize your work, instead of the old way of doings things where devs are expected to focus on and finish one task at a time (per lean manufacturing principles).
I find now that painfully slow builds are no longer a serious issue for me. Because I'm rotating through 15-20 agents across 4-6 projects so I always have something valuable to progress on. One of these projects and a few of these agents are clear priorities I return to sooner than the others.
I always wonder how people make qualitative statements like this. There are so many variables! Is it my prompt? The task? The specific model version? A good or bad branch out of the non-deterministic solution space?
Like, do you run a proper experiment where you hand the same task to multiple models several times and compare the results? Not snark by the way, I’m asking in earnest how you pick one model over another.
> Like, do you run a proper experiment where you hand the same task to multiple models several times and compare the results?
This is what I do. I have a little TUI that fires off Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Qwen Coder and AMP in separate containers for most task I do (although I've started to use AMP less and less), and either returns the last message of what they replied and/or a git diff of what exactly they did. Then I compare them side by side. If all of them got something wrong, I update the prompt, fire them off again. Always starting from zero, and always include the full context of what you're doing with the first message, they're all non-interactive sessions.
Sometimes I do 3x Codex instead of different agents, just to double-check that all of them would do the same thing. If they go off and do different things from each other, I know the initial prompt isn't specific/strict enough, and again iterate.
Please share! I'd much rather help develop your solution than vibe code one of my own ))
Honestly, I'd love to try that. My Gmail username is the same as my HN username.
Not the OP but I have https://github.com/nlothian/autocoder which supports a Github-centric workflow using the following options:
- Claude
- Codex
- Kilocode
- Amp
- Mistral Vibe
I have sent the same prompt to GPT-5.2 Thinking and Gemini 3.0 Pro many times because I subscribe to both.
GPT-5.2 Thinking (with extended thinking selected) is significantly better in my testing on software problems with 40k context.
I attribute this to thinking time, with GPT-5.2 Thinking I can coax 5 minutes+ of thinking time but with Gemini 3.0 Pro it only gives me about 30 seconds.
The main problem with the Plus sub in ChatGPT is you can't send more than 46k tokens in a single prompt, and attaching files doesn't help either because the VM blocks the model from accessing the attachments if there's ~46k tokens already in the context.
Last night I gave one of the flaky tests in our test suite to three different models, using the exact same prompt.
Gemini 3 and Gemini 3 Flash identified the root cause and nailed the fix. GPT 5.1 Codex misdiagnosed the issue and attempted a weird fix despite my prompt saying “don’t write code, simply investigate.”
I run these tests regularly, and Codex has not impressed me. Not even once. At best it’s on par, but most of the time it just fails miserably.
Languages: JavaScript, Elixir, Python
The one time I was impressed with codex was when I was adding translations in a bunch of languages for a business document generation service. I used claude to do the initial work and cross checked with codex.
The codex agent ran for a long time and created and executed a bunch of python scripts (according to the output thinking text) to compare the translations and found a number of possible issues. I am not sure where the scripts were stored or executed, our project doesn't use python.
Then I fed the output of the issues codex found to claude for a second "opinion". Claude said that the feedback was obviously from someone that knew the native language very well and agreed with all the feedback.
I was really surprised at how long Codex was thinking and analyzing - probably 10 minutes. (This was ~1+mo ago, I don't recall exactly what model)
Claude is pretty decent IMO - amp code is better, but seems to burn through money pretty quick.
I have the same experience. To make it worse, there’s a mile of difference between the all too many versions and efforts..
> One surprising thing that codex helped with is procrastination.
The Roomba effect is real. The AI models do all the heavy implementation work, and when it asks me to setup an execute tests, I feel obliged to get to it ASAP.
I have similar experiences with Claude Code ;) Have you used it as well? How does it compare?
I am suspecting there are some shills astroturfing for every LLM release. Or people are overreacting as a result of their unnecessary attachment.
Or, maybe, people are enthusiastic about something that works really well for them. I'm one of those people, LLMs have greatly improved my output on many tasks.
I’ve been using Codex CLI heavily after moving off Claude Code and built a containerized starter to run Codex in different modes: timers/file triggers, API calls, or interactive/single-run CLI. A few others are already using it for agentic workflows. If you want to run Codex securely (or not) in a container to test the model or build workflows, check out https://github.com/DeepBlueDynamics/codex-container.
It ships with 300+ MCP tools (crawl, Google search, Gmail/GCal/GDrive, Slack, scheduling, web indexing, embeddings, transcription, and more). Many came from tools I originally built for Claude Desktop—OpenAI’s MCP has been stable across 20+ versions so I prefer it.
I will note I usually run this in Danger mode but because it runs in a container, it doesn't have access to ENVs I don't want it messing with, and have it in a directory I'm OK with it changing or poking about in.
Headless browser setup for the crawl tools: https://github.com/DeepBlueDynamics/gnosis-crawl.
My email is in my profile if anyone needs help.
I assume those MCP tools are a library and not actually expected to work all at the same time right?
The GPT models, in my experience, have been much better for backend than the Claude models. They're much slower, but produce logic that is more clear, and code that is more maintainable. A pattern I use is, setup a Github issue with Claude plan mode, then have Codex execute it. Then come back to Claude to run custom code review plugins. Then, of course review it with my own eyes before merging the PR.
My only gripe is I wish they'd publish Codex CLI updates to homebrew the same time as npm :)
GPT-5 was the first model that occasionally produced code that I could push without any changes
Claude still tends to add "fluff" around the solution and over-engineer, not that the code doesn't work, it's just that it's ugly
Interesting, I have consistently found that Codex does much better code reviews than Claude. Claude will occasionally find real issues, but will frequently bike shed things I don't care about. Codex always finds things that I do actually care about and that clearly need fixing.
The cybersecurity angle is interesting, because in my experience OpenAI stuff has gotten terrible at cybersecurity because it simply refuses to do anything that can be remotely offensive (as in the opposite of "defensive"). I really thought we as an industry had learned our lesson that blocking "good guys" (aka white-hats) from offensive tools/capabilities only empowers the gray-hat/black-hats and puts us at a disadvantage. A good defense requires some offense. I sure hope they change that.
That's odd, because I'm using plain-old-GPT5 as the backend model for a bunch of offensive stuff and I haven't had any hangups at all. But I'm doing a multi-agent setup where each component has a constrained view of the big picture (ie, a fuzzer agent with tool calls to drive a web fuzzer looking for a particular kind of vulnerability); the high-level orchestration is still mostly human-mediated.
ChatGPT is very happy to help me with offensive tasks. Codex is as well.
Are you somehow prompting around protections or something, or yours is just pretty chill? I've tried a few times with various cybersecurity/secops stuff and it's always basically given me some watered down "I can't talk to you about that, but what I can talk to you about is" and then the is, isn't anything really.
I have the same question. I used to be able to get around it by saying things like, "I'm a cybersecurity professional testing my company's applicaitons" or even lying with "I'm a cybersecurity student trying to learn," but that stopped working at least 6 months ago, maybe a year.
The article mentions that more permissive models would be invite only. I think it's a solid approach, as long as they don't make getting one of those invites too difficult.
> "In parallel, we’re piloting invite-only trusted access to upcoming capabilities and more permissive models for vetted professionals and organizations focused on defensive cybersecurity work. We believe that this approach to deployment will balance accessibility with safety."
I'm moving into a cybersecurity-focused role, and I for one would be very interested in this. A vetting process makes total sense, but complete lack of access seems like a market inefficiency in the making that the one area where we can't reliably get the frontier models to assist us in pentesting our own stuff without a lot of hedging.
So in general you think that making frontier AI models more offensive in black hat capabilities will be good for cybersecurity?
I’m not GP, but I’d argue that “making frontier AI models more offensive in black hat capabilities” is a thing that’s going to happen whether we want it or not, since we don’t control who can train a model. So the more productive way to reason is to accept that that’s going to happen and then figure out the best thing to do.
I think this is a popular rhetorical turn nowadays but I actually don’t agree at all - relatively few actors have the ability to train top models.
It only takes "relatively few" to be a huge problem. Most serious threats come from nation states and criminal gangs, and they definitely do have the ability and resources to train top models. Beyond that though, I would bet many of the nation states even have access to a version of OpenAI/Google/etc that allows them to do this stuff.
Does it shift the playing field towards bad actors in a way that other tools don't?
Yes. The advantage is always on the attacker's side, and this can autonomously find and exploit unknown vulns in a way non-AI tools don't.
Sure, you can also use the same tools to find attack surfaces preemptively, but let's be honest, most wouldn't.
Frontier models are good at offensive capabilities.
Scary good.
But the good ones are not open. It's not even a matter of money. I know at OpenAI they are invite only for instance. Pretty sure there's vetting and tracking going on behind those invites.
People in North American and Western Europe have an extremely blinkered and parochial view of how widely and effectively offensive capabilities are disseminated.
I use openai models every day for offensive work. haven’t had a problem in a long time
OpenAI is really weird about this stuff. I tried to get good minor chord progression out of chatgpt, but it kept running into guardrails and giving Very Serious Warnings. It felt as if there’s just a dumb keyword filter in there, and getting any amounts of verboted words will kill the entire prompt
More generaly, GPT is being heavily neuterd : For exemple I tried to make it rebuild codex itself. It start to answer, then delete the code and go "I'm not to answer that". As if building codex inside codex is a way to terminator and co..
It's interesting that they're foregrounding "cyber" stuff (basically: applied software security testing) this way, but I think we've already crossed a threshold of utility for security work that doesn't require models to advance to make a dent --- and won't be responsive to "responsible use" controls. Zero-shotting is a fun stunt, but in the real world what you need is just hypothesis identification (something the last few generations of models are fine at) and then quick building of tooling.
Most of the time spent in vulnerability analysis is automatable grunt work. If you can just take that off the table, and free human testers up to think creatively about anomalous behavior identified for them, you're already drastically improving effectiveness.
Fascinating to see the increasing acceptance of AI generated code in HN comments.
We've come a long way since gpt-3.5, and it's rewarding to see people who are willing to change their cached responses
I started out very anti-ai at work, and I still think it was reasonable at the time. I have completely changed my mind now (as models have improved drastically), and I think you now need to provide a valid excuse for NOT using it in some way/shape/form. A simple webhook to check a PR is a no-brainer unless you're a freakishly superb coder. Some coworkers still seem to waste more time fighting an ever-increasingly-hallucinating chatbot over niche helm chart issues than they would if they had just read the documentation in the first place, but people can abuse any tool.
Somehow Codex for me is always way worse than the base models.
Especially in the CLI, it seems that its so way too eager to start writing code nothing can stop it, not even the best Agents.md.
Asking it a question or telling it to check something doesn‘t mean it should start editing code, it means answer the question. All models have this issue to some degree, but codex is the worst offender for me.
Just use the non-codex models for investigation and planning, they listen to "do not edit any files yet, just reply here in chat". And they're better at getting the bigger picture. Then you can use the -codex variant for execution of a carefully drafted plan.
Same experience here.
I see people gushing over these codex models but they seem worse than the big gpt models in my own actual use (i.e. I'll give the same prompt to gpt-5.1 and gpt-5.1-codex and codex will give me functional but weird/ugly code, whereas gpt-5.1 code is cleaner)
> Somehow Codex for me is always way worse than the base models.
I feel the same. CodexTheModel (why have two things named the same way?!) is a good deal faster than the other models, and probably on the "fast/accuracy" scale it sits somewhere else, but most code I want to be as high quality as possible, and the base models do seem better at that than CodexTheModel.
Agreed. They are working on a plan mode that should hopefully alleviate this.
What has somewhat worked for me atm is to ask to only update an .md plan file and act on the file only, seems to appease its eagerness to write files.
"Don't write any code yet, we're just having a discussion" - works for me, ymmv etc.
I've had this issues as well since codex models were introduced. i tried them but 5.1 regular on high thinking always worked better for me. I think its because its thinking is deeper and more nuanced it seemed to understand better what needed doing. I did have to interact more often with it versus Codex which just worked for a long time by itself, but those interactions were worth it in reduction of assumptions and other stuff Codex made. Im gonna try 5,2 Codex today and hope that changes, but so far I've been happy with base 5.1 high thinking.
No one's saying this but this is around 40% costlier than the previous codex model. Price change is important.
Because the best value is from the subscription where the price is stable
From a couple hours of usage in the CLI, 5.2-codex seems to burn through my plan's limit noticeably faster than 5.1-codex. So I guess the usage limit is a set dollar amount of API credits under the hood.
> In parallel, we’re piloting invite-only trusted access to upcoming capabilities and more permissive models for vetted professionals and organizations focused on defensive cybersecurity work. We believe that this approach to deployment will balance accessibility with safety.
Yeah, this makes sense. There's a fine line between good enough to do security research and good enough to be a prompt kiddie on steroids. At the same time, aligning the models for "safety" would probably make them worse overall, especially when dealing with security questions (i.e. analyse this code snippet and provide security feedback / improvements).
At the end of the day, after some KYC I see no reason why they shouldn't be "in the clear". They get all the positive news (i.e. our gpt666-pro-ultra-krypto-sec found a CVE in openBSD stable release), while not being exposed to tabloid style titles like "a 3 year old asked chatgpt to turn on the lights and chatgpt hacked into nasa, news at 5"...
Can anyone elaborate on what they're referring to here?
> GPT‑5.2-Codex has stronger cybersecurity capabilities than any model we’ve released so far. These advances can help strengthen cybersecurity at scale, but they also raise new dual-use risks that require careful deployment.
I'm curious what they mean by the dual-use risks.
"Please review this code for any security vulnerabilities" has two very different outcomes depending on if its the maintainer or threat actor prompting the model
“Dual-use” here usually isn’t about novel attack techniques, but about lowering the barrier to execution. The same improvements that help defenders reason about exploit chains, misconfigurations, or detection logic can also help an attacker automate reconnaissance, payload adaptation, or post-exploitation analysis. Historically, this shows up less as “new attacks” and more as speed and scale shifts. Things that required an experienced operator become accessible to a much wider audience. That’s why deployment controls, logging, and use-case constraints matter as much as the raw capability itself.
Finding/patching exploits means you also can exploit them better?
They did some interesting wordsmithing here to cover their ass without saying it directly.
probably that it's good on tasks of either color teams, red or blue - and if it is, it means you can automate some... interesting workflows.
Good at finding/fixing security vulnerabilities = Good at finding/exploiting security vulnerabilities.
Codex code review has been astounding for my distributed team of devs. Very well spent money.
[flagged]
It is common for people to read a word and then re-use it themselves shortly after.
Humans are very suggestible.
Can't see the original comment, is that about my usage of the "astounding" word? I am Ukrainian (not a native speaker), and it popped up subconsciously, but now that I see it it another comment – very likely I just read it, that's why indeed! Amazing
> Can't see the original comment, is that about my usage of the "astounding" word?
It was indeed!
> very likely I just read it
I find myself doing it frequently. I'm even sure that's why I used indeed above after reading your comment - it wasn't intentional!
I later realized the missing opportunity to reply "You're absolutely right! I did use the "astounding" word too repetatively :D
very true
curious if this, or coincidence
"Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action." -Ian Fleming, Goldfinger (1959)
We have made this model even better at programming in Windows. Give it a shot :)
Can you invite me? In the off chance, my email is in my profile, but reversed.
GPT 5.1 has been pure magic in VSCode via the Codex plugin. I can't tell any difference with 5.2 yet. I hope the Codex plugin gets feature parity with CC, Cursor, Kilo Code etc soon. That should increase performance a bit more through scaffolding.
I had assumed OpenAI was irrelevant, but 5.1 has been so much better than Gemini.
would love to see some comparison numbers to Gemini and Claude, especially with this claim:
"The most advanced agentic coding model for professional software engineers"
I can confirm GPT 5.2 is better than Gemini and Claude. GPT 5.2 Codex is probably even better.
Gemini 2.5 or 3? (3 was released yesterday)
I tried Gemini 3 Flash, and I am unimpressed. It's maybe a competitor to Cursor's Compose-1, but completely different league from GPT 5.2
Surely Gemini 3.0 Pro would be the appropriate comparison.
If you want to compare the weakest models from both companies then Gemini Flash vs GPT Instant would seem to be best comparison, although Claude Opus 4.5 is by all accounts the most powerful for coding.
In any case, it will take a few weeks for any meaningful test comparisons to be made, and in the meantime it's hard not to see any release from OpenAI since they announced "Code Red" (aka "we're behind the competition") a few days ago as more marketing than anything else.
That's what I said in my original message. By my account, GPT 5.2 is better than Gemini 3 Pro and Opus 4.5
Gemini 3 Pro is a great foundation model. I use as a math tutor, and it's great. I previously used Gemini 2.5 Pro as a math tutor, and Gemini 3 Pro was a qualitative improvement over that. But Gemini 3 Pro sucks at being a coding agent inside a harness. It sucks at tool calling. It's borderline unusable in Cursor because of that, and likely the same in Antigravity. A few weeks ago I attended a demo of Antigravity that Google employees were giving, and it was completely broken. It got stuck for them during the demo, and they ended up not being able to show anything.
Opus 4.5 is good, and faster than GPT-5.2, but less reliable. I use it for medium difficulty tasks. But for anything serious—it's GPT 5.2
Your experience seems to match the recent results from swe-rebench: https://swe-rebench.com/
Agreed. Gemini 3 is still pretty bad at agentic coding.
Just yesterday, in Antigravity, while applying changes, it deleted 500 lines of code and replaced it with a `<rest of code goes here>`. Unacceptable behavior in 2025, lol.
Gemini 3.0 Flash outperforms Pro in many tasks - I believe the coding benchmark was one of them.
Glad I'm not alone in thinking Flash 3 was like Composer 1 in speed but smarter
It’s significantly slower though. At least for my use cases I rather ask Claude 4.5 opus and switch to GPT if Claude is stuck.
I'm gonna call bs on these kind of comments. "better" on what? Coding models shouldn't even be compared isolated. A big part of making it work in a real/big codebase is the tool that calls the model (claude code, gemini-cli, etc). I'll bet claude code will still keep stealing your lunch every day of the week against any competitor out there
I haven't used CC in a few months, what killer features have they added? I am using Cursor, it's clunky, but not that clunky so as to completely destroy model performance. I am pretty sure for my tasks (undocumented, buggy, legacy JavaScript project) GPT-5.2 is > all on any decent harness, because it doesn't give up or half-ass. It can run for 5 minutes or for 50 minutes, depending on your request.
lol bold claim initially for not using the primary competitor in months. I try to use all 3 (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI); there are tradeoffs between all 3
Read my reply to sibling comment. To my knowledge, Claude Code is at most marginally better than Cursor, and it's mostly the model that matters. Not saying there is no room for improvement on the tooling side, but no one seems to have come up with anything so far. Let me know which killer features Claude Code has, I would be happy to learn.
it’s the “agentic harness” — they have shipped tons of great features for the DevEx, but it’s the combination of better models (Sonnet 4.5 1M, now Opus 4.5) and the “prompting”/harness that improves how it actually performs
again I’m not saying Codex is worse, they’re just different and claiming the only one you actively use is the best is a stretch
edit: also FWIW, I initially dismissed Claude Code at launch, then loved Codex when it released. never really liked Cursor. now I primarily use Claude Code given I found Codex slow and less “reliable” in a sense, but I try to try all 3 and keep up with the changes (it is hard)
> they have shipped tons of great features for the DevEx
Such as?
> again I’m not saying Codex is worse, they’re just different and claiming the only one you actively use is the best is a stretch
I am testing all models in Cursor.
> I initially dismissed Claude Code at launch, then loved Codex when it released. never really liked Cursor
I also don't actually like Cursor. It's a VSCode fork, and a mediocre harness. I am only using it because my company refuses to buy anything else, because Cursor has all models, and it appears to them that it's not worth having anything else.
you conveniently ignored the most important part of my comment :)
> Such as?
changelog is here: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/CHANGELO...
glhf
btw you started this thread with pure vibes, no evidence:
> I can confirm GPT 5.2 is better than Gemini and Claude. GPT 5.2 Codex is probably even better.
I’m saying you’re wrong. N=2, 1 against 1, one of us is making a much less bold claim