OpenClaw creator on Codex vs Claude Code

 The OpenClaw creator on how he still uses Claude Code but he finds OpenAI GPT Codex better for coding (YouTube 45:49):

But the real change that sold it for me was, again, GPT 5.2. I think it’s underrated. I don’t know why all these people still use Claude Code. I kind of get it -- it’s a different way of working -- but whatever OpenAI cooked there is insanely good. Pretty much every prompt I type gives me the result I want, which is insane. On ClawdBot, my latest product, I use between five and ten agents in parallel.

If you’re very much a Claude Code builder, you have to forget quite a lot of the silliness -- the things that you have to do to create good output with Claude Code. I also met that team, and they created a whole new category. Claude Code is a category-defining product, and it is amazing for general-purpose computer work, and it is really good for coding. I still use it almost every day. But for writing code in complex applications, Codex is just so much better because it takes ten times longer.

Claude would read three files and then be confident enough to just create code, and then you really have to steer it and push it so it reads more code, so it sees a bigger picture of your codebase, so that it weaves in new features better. Codex will just be silent and read files for ten minutes. If you only work on one terminal, I completely understand how you find this unbearable. But I’d rather have something where -- and also, you don’t tell it what to do. This is something that people don’t get. I have a conversation with the model. It’s like, “Oh, let’s look at this. What options do we have for this structure? Did you consider this feature?” Because every session is like the model starts from having no understanding about your product, and sometimes you have to just give it a little bit of pointers. “What about this and this?” So it explores different directions.

You don’t need plan mode. I’m just having a conversation until I say “build this” -- it will not build this. There’s some trigger words because they all are a little trigger-happy, but as soon as I say “let’s discuss” or “give me options,” they will not build things until I say “build.”