GPT-5.2-Codex

https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-2-codex/

by meetpateltech • 7 months ago

589 310 7 months ago

openai.com

exacube• 7 months ago

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"

koakuma-chan11• 7 months ago

I can confirm GPT 5.2 is better than Gemini and Claude. GPT 5.2 Codex is probably even better.

cj• 7 months ago

Gemini 2.5 or 3? (3 was released yesterday)

nunodonato3• 7 months ago

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

speedgoose• 7 months ago

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.

whinvik2• 7 months ago

I actually have 0 enthusiasm for this model. When GPT 5 came out it was clearly the best model, but since Opus 4.5, GPT5.x just feels so slow. So, I am going to skip all `thinking` releases from OpenAI and check them again only if they come up with something that does not rely so much on thinking.

famahar• 7 months ago

It's wild to me how people get used to new ground breaking coding LLM models. Every time a new update comes there are so many people that think it's trash because it made an error or takes some time to think. We all have access to a skilled (enough) pair programmer available 24/7. Like I'm still recovering from the shock of the first coding capable LLM from 2 years ago.

whinvik2• 7 months ago

Haha the issue is competition. If nothing else existed then every GPT5.X release would have been amazing.

But Opus 4.5 exists.

seneca2• 7 months ago

I hope this makes a big jump forward for them. I used to be a heavy Codex user, but it has just been so much worse than Claude Code both in UX and in actual results that I've completely given up on it. Anthropic needs a real competitor to keep them motivated and they just don't have one right now, so I'd really like to see OpenAI get back in the game.

GenerWork2• 7 months ago

GPT 5.2 has gotten a lot better at building UI elements when given a Figma MCP server link. I used to use Claude for building brand new UI elements based on the Figma link, but 5.2 caught up to a point where I'm probably going to cancel Claude.

seneca2• 7 months ago

Nice, I'll have to give that a shot. I often use Claude for exactly that.

misiti37802• 7 months ago

i didnt realize you can pass it a figma MCP link. is this an undocumented feature ?

NitpickLawyer• 7 months ago

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"...

larrymcp• 7 months ago

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.

pixl97• 7 months ago

Finding/patching exploits means you also can exploit them better?

throwaway127482• 7 months ago

They did some interesting wordsmithing here to cover their ass without saying it directly.

runtimepanic• 7 months ago

“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.

baq2• 7 months ago

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.

tgtweak3• 7 months ago

Good at finding/fixing security vulnerabilities = Good at finding/exploiting security vulnerabilities.

dpoloncsak• 7 months ago

"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

OldGreenYodaGPT• 7 months ago

GPT 5.2 has been very good in codex can't wait to try this new modal. Will see how it compares to Opus 4.5

firemelt• 7 months ago

tell me the rrsultz which one do you prefer

tptacek4• 7 months ago

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.

trunnell2• 7 months ago

Why aren’t they making gpt-5.2-codex available in the API at launch?

kingstnap• 7 months ago

we’re piloting invite-only trusted access to upcoming capabilities and more permissive models

Just safety nerds being gatekeepers.

trunnell2• 7 months ago

That’s for future unreleased capabilities and models, not the model released today.

They did the same thing for gpt-5.1-codex-max (code name “arcticfox”), delaying its availability in the API and only allowing it to be used by monthly plan users, and as an API user I found it very annoying.

MallocVoidstar• 7 months ago

They can't train on the API.

dist-epoch• 7 months ago

They say it's because it's too good at hacking stuff.

fellowniusmonk2• 7 months ago

In all my unpublished tests, which focus on 1. unique logic puzzles that are intentionally adjacent to existing puzzles and 2. implementing a specific unique CRDT algorithm that is not particularly common but has an official reference implementation on github (so the models definitely been trained on it) I find that 5.2 overfits to the more common implementation and will actively break working code and puzzles.

I find it to be incorrectly pattern matching with a very narrow focus and will ignore real documented differences even when explicitly highlighted in the prompt text (this is X crdt algo not Y crdt algo.)

I've canceled my subscription, the idea that on any larger edits it will just start wrecking nuance and then refuse to accept prompts that point this out is an extremely dangerous form of target fixation.

pillefitz• 7 months ago

How does Claude perform?

fellowniusmonk2• 7 months ago

They all have difficulty with certain crdts types in general, 4.5 opus has to go through a round of ask to give it clarifying instructions but then it's fine. Neither get it perfectly as a one shot, claude if you jump straight into agent won't break code but will churn for a bit.

postalcoder2• 7 months ago

It has become very quickly unfashionable for people to say they like the Codex CLI. I still enjoy working with it and my only complaint is that its speed makes it unideal for pair coding.

On top of that, the Codex CLI team is responsive on github and it's clear that user complaints make their way to the team responsible for fine tuning these models.

I run bake offs on between all three models and GPT 5.2 generally has a higher success rate of implementing features, followed closely by Opus 4.5 and then Gemini 3, which has troubles with agentic coding. I'm interested to see how 5.2-codex behaves. I haven't been a fan of the codex models in general.

jbm• 7 months ago

When Claude screws up a task I use Codex and vice versa. It helps a lot when I'm working on libraries that I've never touched before, especially iOS related.

(Also, I can't imagine who is blessed with so much spare tome that they would look down on an assistant that does decent work)

embedding-shape3• 7 months ago

When Claude screws up a task I use Codex and vice versa

Yeah, it feels really strange sometimes. Bumping up against something that Codex seemingly can't work out, and you give it to Claude and suddenly it's easy. And you continue with Claude and eventually it gets stuck on something, and you try Codex which gets it immediately. My guess would be that the training data differs just enough for it to have an impact.

dingnuts• 7 months ago

the faddish nature of these tools fits the narrative of the METR findings that the tools slow you down while making you feel faster.

since nobody (other than that paper) has been trying to measure output, everything is based on feelings and fashion, like you say.

I'm still raw dogging my code. I'll start using these tools when someone can measure the increase in output. Leadership at work is beginning to claim they can, so maybe the writing is on the wall for me. They haven't shown their methodology for what they are measuring, just telling everyone they "can tell"

But until then, I can spot too many psychological biases inherent in their use to trust my own judgement, especially when the only real study done so far on this subject shows that our intuition lies about this.

And in the meantime, I've already lost time investigating reasonable looking open source projects that turned out to be 1) vibe coded and 2) fully non functional even in the most trivial use. I'm so sick of it. I need a new career

qsort• 7 months ago

I care very little about fashion, whether in clothes or in computers. I've always liked Anthropic products a bit more but Codex is excellent, if that's your jam more power to you.

EnPissant• 7 months ago

Claude Code is just a better CLI:

- Planning mode. Codex is extremely frustrating. You have to constantly tell it not to edit when you talk to it, and even then it will sometimes just start working.

- Better terminal rendering (Codex seems to go for a "clean" look at the cost of clearly distinguished output)

- It prompts you for questions using menus

- Sub-agents don't pollute your context

mccoyb3• 7 months 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.

tgtweak3• 7 months ago

Anecdotally I've found it very good in the exact same case for multi-agent workflows - as the "reviewer"

ifwinterco• 7 months ago

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

mccoyb3• 7 months ago

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?

golly_ned• 7 months ago

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.

zozbot2342• 7 months ago

The "quality" model can cost $200/month. They'll be fine.

tejohnso• 7 months ago

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.

kilroy1232• 7 months ago

Interesting what I've seen is it spins and thinks forever. Then just breaks. Which is beyond frustrating.

mccoyb3• 7 months ago

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.

baq2• 7 months ago

we're all senior continue engineers nowadays it seems

apitman• 7 months ago

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.

gnatolf• 7 months ago

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.

echelon• 7 months ago

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 :

https://imgur.com/a/previz-to-image-nano-banana-pro-Q2B8psd

baseonmars• 7 months ago

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.

mkagenius• 7 months ago

Have you tried Claude Code in the second tab instead, that would be a fair comparison.

garbagecoder• 7 months ago

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.

heliumtera2• 7 months ago

Maybe you're a garbage programmer and that error was too obvious. Interesting observation, though.

edit: username joke, don't get me banned

josephg• 7 months ago

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.

varjag• 7 months ago

Interestingly it found a GC bug in my toy Lisp that I wrote in Z80 assembly almost 30 years ago. This kind of work appears to be more common than you'd think!

johnnyfived• 7 months ago

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.

smoe• 7 months ago

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?

nl3• 7 months ago

The $20 does this fine.

The OpenAI token limits seem more generous than the Anthropic ones too.

hatefulmoron• 7 months ago

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.

jvermillard2• 7 months ago

I use it everyday and the $20 plan is fine

sinatra2• 7 months ago

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!

F7F7F7• 7 months ago

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.

AmazingTurtle• 7 months ago

Have you tried telling Claude not to leave serious quality issues behind?

energy1232• 7 months ago

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.

jvermillard2• 7 months ago

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

rane• 7 months ago

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.

stared• 7 months ago

If you want to combine Claude Code coding with reasoning, it is easy to do it with a plugin - https://github.com/stared/gemini-claude-skills, wrote for myself, but shared in case anyone wants. Somehow bigger context here: https://quesma.com/blog/claude-skills-not-antigravity/.

mattio• 7 months ago

Completely agreed. Used claude and codex both on highest tier next to each other for a month. On complex tasks where Claude would get stuck and not be able to fix it at all, codex would fix the issue in one go. Codex is amazing.

I did found some slip ups in 5.2 where I did a refactor of a client header where I removed two header properties, but 5.2 forgot to remove those from the toArray method of the class. Was using 5.2 on medium (default).

79a6ed872• 7 months ago

My only concern with Codex is that it's not possible to delete tasks.

This is a privacy and security risk. Your code diffs and prompts are there (seemingly) forever. Best you can do is "archive" them, which is a fancy word for "put it somewhere else so it doesn't clutter the main page".

Leynos3• 7 months ago

Terragon is an alternative (hosts Claude and Codex using your OpenAI and Anthropic subscriptions, and also supports Google and Amp) that provides this functionality.

I use it because it works out cheaper than Codex Cloud and gives you greater flexibility. Although it doesn't have 5.2-codex yet.

tgtweak3• 7 months ago

Yes but if it's not getting removed at the origin... it's not fixing the actual issue of the context/conversation surviving past an explicit "delete" request. Also let's not forget that anyone proxying LLMs is also man in the middle to any code that goes up/down.

throwuxiytayq• 7 months ago

It's weird, suspicious, and plain annoying. I like the the tool and my tests have shown it to be very powerful (if a bit rough and buggy), but this is ridiculous - I won't use it for any real world projects until this is fixed.

Then again, I wouldn't put much trust into OpenAI's handling of information either way.

moralestapia2• 7 months ago

`rm -rf ~/.codex/archived_sessions` does the trick

79a6ed872• 7 months ago

Interesting. Where do I run that?

sunaookami• 7 months ago

Are you talking about Codex Web? This is different from Codex CLI.

shanev• 7 months ago

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 :)

mrcwinn• 7 months ago

I’d agree with you until Opus 4.5.

SamDc73• 7 months ago

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

lemming• 7 months ago

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.

allovertheworld• 7 months ago

Eh sonnet 4.5 was better at Rust for me

k_bx• 7 months ago

Codex code review has been astounding for my distributed team of devs. Very well spent money.

freedomben4• 7 months ago

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.

mapontosevenths• 7 months ago

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."

hiAndrewQuinn• 7 months ago

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.

hhh• 7 months ago

I use openai models every day for offensive work. haven’t had a problem in a long time

JacobAsmuth• 7 months ago

So in general you think that making frontier AI models more offensive in black hat capabilities will be good for cybersecurity?

artursapek• 7 months ago

Of course. Bugs only get patched if they’re found.

abigail95• 7 months ago

Does it shift the playing field towards bad actors in a way that other tools don't?

Uehreka• 7 months ago

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.

bilbo0s• 7 months ago

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.

tptacek4• 7 months ago

People in North American and Western Europe have an extremely blinkered and parochial view of how widely and effectively offensive capabilities are disseminated.

nikanj• 7 months ago

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

user342834• 7 months ago

This is why Grok is important.

So far it's rarely been the leading frontier model, but at least it's not full of dumb guardrails that block many legitimate use cases in order to prevent largely imagined harm.

You can also use Grok without sign in, in a private window, for sensitive queries where privacy matters.

A lot of liberals badmouth the model for obviously political reasons, but it's doing an important job.

tptacek4• 7 months ago

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.

julienfr112• 7 months ago

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..

prettyblocks2• 7 months ago

ChatGPT is very happy to help me with offensive tasks. Codex is as well.

neom3• 7 months ago

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.

tananaev• 7 months ago

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.

BinaryIgor• 7 months ago

I have similar experiences with Claude Code ;) Have you used it as well? How does it compare?

9dev• 7 months ago

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.

embedding-shape3• 7 months ago

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.

enraged_camel2• 7 months ago

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

energy1232• 7 months ago

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.

jackschultz3• 7 months ago

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.

nextaccountic• 7 months ago

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)

7thpower• 7 months ago

What are you talking about? 5.2 literally just came out.

jillesvangurp• 7 months ago

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.

wahnfrieden4• 7 months ago

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.

girvo2• 7 months ago

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

AstroBen• 7 months ago

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

ssl-3• 7 months ago

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.)

anabis• 7 months ago

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.

freedomben4• 7 months ago

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.

thek3nger• 7 months ago

This works for me in general. If I am procrastinating, I ask a coding agent for a small task. If it works, I have something to improve upon. If it doesn’t work, my OCD forces me to “fix it.” :D

cmrdporcupine• 7 months ago

I think Opus + Claude Code is the more competent overall general "making things" system, while it makes sense to have a $20 Codex subscription to find bugs and review the things that Claude Code makes.

On its own, as sole author, I find Codex overcomplicates things. It will riddle your code with unnecessary helper functions and objects and pointless abstractions.

It is however useful for doing a once over for code review and finding the things that Claude rushed through.

lacoolj• 7 months ago

lol I love how OpenAI just straight up doesn't compare their model to others on these release pages. Basically telling us they know Gemini and Opus are better but they don't want to draw attention to it

qwesr1232• 7 months ago

Not sure why they don't compare with others, but they are actually leading on the benchmarks they published. See here (bottom) for a chart comparing to other models: https://marginlab.ai/blog/swe-bench-deep-dive/

mistercheph3• 7 months ago

It's like apple, they just don't want users or anyone to even be thinking of their competitors, the competition doesn't exist, it's not relevant.

whimsicalism3• 7 months ago

is swe-bench saturated? or they switch to swe-bench pro because...?

dbbk• 7 months ago

This was the one thing I scanned for. No comparison against Opus. See ya.

Mkengin5• 7 months ago

Though this Codex version isnt on the leaderboard, GPT-5.2-Medium already seems to be a bit better than Opus 4.5: https://swe-rebench.com/

jasonthorsness• 7 months ago

Recently I’ve had the best results with Gemini; with this I’ll have to go back to Codex for my next project. It takes time to get a feel for the capabilities of a model it’s sort of tedious having new ones come out so frequently.

tonyhart7• 7 months ago

very minuscule improvement, I suspect GPT 5.2 is already coding model from the ground up and this codex model include "various optimization + tool" on tops

CjHuber• 7 months ago

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.

w-m• 7 months ago

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.

embedding-shape3• 7 months ago

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.

drdrey2• 7 months ago

have you tried adjusting the reasoning effort?

JeremyNT• 7 months ago

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)

nowittyusername• 7 months ago

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.

6thbit• 7 months ago

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.

flir2• 7 months ago

"Don't write any code yet, we're just having a discussion" - works for me, ymmv etc.

lkt• 7 months ago

I've been doing some reverse engineering recently and have found Gemini 3 Pro to be the best model for that, surprisingly much better than Opus 4.5. Maybe it's time to give Codex a try

sigmar• 7 months ago

Curious what your workflow is for reverse engineering with LLMs? Do you run the LLM in an IDE?

mistercheph3• 7 months ago

Gotta love only comparing the model to other openai models and just like yesterday's gemini thread, the vibes in this thread are so astroturfed. I guess it makes sense for the frontier labs to want to win the hearts and minds of silicon valley.

tptacek4• 7 months ago

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mistercheph3• 7 months ago

Sorry, didn't realize.

abshkbh• 7 months ago

We have made this model even better at programming in Windows. Give it a shot :)

helsinki• 7 months ago

Can you invite me? In the off chance, my email is in my profile, but reversed.

holtkam2• 7 months ago

You mean its ability to use powershell, or something else?

lukax• 7 months ago

Will it also remove the whole D:\?

catigula• 7 months ago

The models aren't smart enough to be fully agentic. This is why Claude Code human-in-the-loop process is 100x more ergonomic.

bgwalter• 7 months ago

They found one React bug and spend pages on "frontier" "cyber" nonsense. They make these truly marvelous models only available to "vetted" "security professionals".

I can imagine what the vetting looks like: The professionals are not allowed to disclose that the models don't work.

EDIT: It must really hurt that ORCL is down 40% from its high due to overexposure in OpenAI.

ianberdin• 7 months ago

Thanks gosh, we have so bloody competition.

The models are so good, unbelievable good. And getting better weekly, including pricing.

Alifatisk• 7 months ago

<PLACEHOLDER FOR FRONTEND HTML ASSETS>
[ADD/LINK TO ROLLOUT THAT DISCOVERED VULNERABILITY]

What’s up with these in the article?

fragmede5• 7 months ago

So, uh, I've been being and idiot and running it in yolo mode, and twice now it's gone and deleted the entire project directory, wiping out all of my work. Thankfully I have backups and it's my fault for playing with fire, but yeesh.

I have https://gist.github.com/fragmede/96f35225c29cf8790f10b1668b8... as a guard against that, for anyone that's stupid enough like me to run it in yolo mode and wants to copy it.

Codex also has command line options so you can specifically prohibit running rm in bash, so look those up too.

dworks• 7 months ago

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.

kordlessagain5• 7 months ago

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.

pertymcpert• 7 months ago

I assume those MCP tools are a library and not actually expected to work all at the same time right?

kordlessagain5• 7 months ago

Yes, you can draw from it. There is a config file you can use to edit to "install" or "remove" them from the build. You can also just ask the agent to do it.

marktolson• 7 months ago

Looks good but there is no way I'm installing powershell as a dependency.

cachius• 7 months ago

Why not?

kordlessagain5• 7 months ago

I've kept the codex-container.sh version going for this eventuality.

Those scripts are for running the docker command with all the ENV vars and settings. Whatever does that does NOT have to be Powershell if you don't want it to be.

derrasterpunkt• 7 months ago

I’m just at the beginning but I will try this out, thanks!

kordlessagain5• 7 months ago

Let me know if you need anything!

fragmede5• 7 months ago

Fwiw, I had some well defined tickets in Jira assigned to me, and 5.2 absolutely crushed them. Still waiting on CI, but games over.

ChrisMarshallNY• 7 months ago

For example, just last week, a security researcher using GPT‑5.1-Codex-Max with Codex CLI found and responsibly disclosed (opens in a new window) a vulnerability in React that could lead to source code exposure.

Translation: "Hey y'all! Get ready for a tsunami of AI-generated CVEs!"

mvkel• 7 months ago

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

scottyah3• 7 months ago

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.

simianwords• 7 months ago

No one's saying this but this is around 40% costlier than the previous codex model. Price change is important.

wahnfrieden4• 7 months ago

Because the best value is from the subscription where the price is stable

crazylogger• 7 months ago

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.

aaa_aaa• 7 months ago

I am suspecting there are some shills astroturfing for every LLM release. Or people are overreacting as a result of their unnecessary attachment.

wickedsight• 7 months ago

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.

PostOnce2• 7 months ago

It sure seems like it. That or delirious, misguided fans who want AI to succeed even though there would be no benefit in it for them if that were the case. They'd just be serfs again.

I watched a man struggle for 3 hours last night to "prove me wrong" that Gemini 3 Pro can convert a 3000 line C program to Python. It can't do it. It can't even do half of it, it can't understand why it can't, it's wrong about what failed, it can't fix it when you tell it what it did wrong, etc.

Of course, in the end, he had an 80 line Python file that didn't work, and if it did work, it's 80 lines, of course it can't do what the 3000 line C program is doing. So even if it had produced a working program, which it didn't, it would have produced a program that did not solve the problems it was asked to solve.

The AI can't even guess that it's 80 line output is probably wrong just based on the size of it, like a human instantly would.

AI doesn't work. It hasn't worked, and it very likely is not going to work. That's based on the empirical evidence and repeatable tests we are surrounded by.

The guy last night said that sentiment was copium, before he went on a 3 hour odyssey that ended in failure. It'll be sad to watch that play out in the economy at large.

user342834• 7 months ago

AI works. This is evidenced by my side project which I spent some 50 hours on.

I'm not sure what your "empirical evidence and repeatable tests" is supposed to be. The AI not successfully converting a 3000 line C program to Python, in a test you probably designed to fail, doesn't strike me as particularly relevant.

Also, I suspect that AI could most likely guess that 80 lines of Python aren't correctly replicating 3000 lines of C, if you prompted it correctly.

sedawkgrep• 7 months ago

This is an interesting thread to me and my experience as a total hack programmer has been both awesome and pathetic with regards to AI.

Recently I tried working with both ChatGPT and Gemini (AI Studio) to take a really badly written PHP website and refactor it into MVC components. I've worked strictly through the web UI as this only involved a few files.

While both provided great guidance around how to approach disentangling this monolithic code, GPT failed miserably, generating code that was syntactically incorrect, and then doubling-down on it by insisting that it was correct and that errors were faults lying elsewhere. It literally generated code that lacked closing parenthesis and brackets.

In contrast, Gemini generated a perfectly working MVC version from the start. In both instances I did intentionally keep it on track to only separate the code into MVC and NOT to optimize anything, but it worked the first try. I've then taken it through subsequent refactorings and it's done superbly in that role.

So I can't speak to how well this works for large code bases, much less agentically. (my initial, very focused MVC refactor was about 1300 lines.) But when giving it a very specific task with strict guidance and rules, my results with Gemini were fantastic.

alecco• 7 months ago

I was a big fan of Claude. Even defending CC from all the haters on Discord. Then Anthropic started to play games and quality of the model dropped while the app became very unstable. (not about limits in my case as I'm not a vivecoder)

I really dislike Altman, but honestly Codex is far superior. And their models are better or at least as good. And they are much better for backend/low level/C++/CUDA IME. Codex CLI is simpler and lean. Perhaps because Codex was rewritten in Rust earlier this year while CC is still in TypeScript.

ajpikul• 7 months ago

Yeah I use both and this post feels VERY astroturfed.

hmate9• 7 months ago

I'm glad we are moving towards more of quality over speed

phplovesong• 7 months ago

But when will they release SLOP-1.7-Jizz

mohsen1• 7 months ago

Since they are not showing you how this model compares against the benchmarks they are showing, here is a quick view with the public numbers from Google and Anthropic. At least this gives some context:

    SWE-Bench (Pro / Verified)

    Model               | Pro (%) | Verified (%)
    --------------------+---------+--------------
    GPT-5.2-Codex       | 56.4    | ~80
    GPT-5.2             | 55.6    | ~80
    Claude Opus 4.5     | n/a     | ~80.9
    Gemini 3 Pro        | n/a     | ~76.2

And for terminal workflows, where agentic steps matter:

    Terminal-Bench 2.0

    Model               | Score (%)
    --------------------+-----------
    Claude Opus 4.5     | ~60+
    Gemini 3 Pro        | ~54
    GPT-5.2-Codex       | ~47

So yes, GPT-5.2-Codex is good, but when you put it next to its real competitors:

- Claude is still ahead on strict coding + terminal-style tasks

- Gemini is better for huge context + multimodal reasoning

- GPT-5.2-Codex is strong but not clearly the new state of the art across the board

It feels a bit odd that the page only shows internal numbers instead of placing them next to the other leaders.

qwesr1232• 7 months ago

Where are you getting SWE-Bench Verified scores for 5.2-Codex? AFAIK those have not been published.

And I don't think your Terminal-Bench 2.0 scores are accurate. Per the latest benchmarks: Opus 4.5 is at 59% GPT-5.2-Codex is at 64%

See the charts at the bottom of https://marginlab.ai/blog/swe-bench-deep-dive/ and https://marginlab.ai/blog/terminal-bench-deep-dive/

scellus• 7 months ago

I like Opus 4.5 a lot, but a general comment on benchmarks: the number of subtasks or problems in each one is finite, and many of the benchmarks are saturating, so the effective number of problems at the frontier is even smaller. If you think of the generalizable capability of the model as a latent feature to be measured by benchmarks, we therefore have only rather noisy estimates. People read too much into small differences in numbers. It's best to aggregate across many, Epoch has their Capabilities Index, and Artificial Analysis is doing something similar, and probably others I don't know or remember.

And then there's the part of models that is hard to measure. Opus has some sort of HAL-like smoothness I don't see in other models, but meanwhile, I haven't tried gpt-5.2 for coding yet. (Neither Gemini 3 Pro; I'm not claiming superiority of Opus, just that something in practical usability is hard to measure.)

blitz_skull• 7 months ago

Ahhh, there it is.

My rule of thumb with OpenAI is, if they don’t publish their benchmarks beside Anthropic’s numbers it’s because they’re still not caught up.

So far my rule of thumb has held true.

thedougd• 7 months ago

I'm finding that the newer GPT models are much more willing to leverage tools/skills than Claude, reducing interventions requesting approval. Just an observation.

hereme888• 7 months ago

Constantly disconnects in VS Code extension. Have to switch to regular 5.2...

aunty_helen• 7 months ago

The biggest question for me is "Why?"

They're getting slaughtered by the more focused Anthropic team who decided they will have the best coding model.

Given how bad things have been going recently (5.2 chat bombing and being behind, opus being the code GOAT, G team dominating media, Grok existing and meta / the Chinese dominating opensource), they should niche to the general purpose llm before that's all they're left with by market forces.

I'm still pretty sour they didn't have the vision at the time to build an ecosystem around them and instead went for those building the ecosystem on them.

GPT-5.2-Codex

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