Why Codex Is My Default Now

Codex has been my main AI tooling for personal projects for a little while now, and the real reason is because when I was picking between Claude and Codex, Claude was famously having a bunch of headaches with limits, whereas Codex was throwing usage and limit resets around like nothing.

I use Claude at work, through Bedrock, so no limits or anything like that. So I'm comparing a cheap Codex plan against an all singing all dancing Claude plan, and I still find Codex to perform better.

Now I'm not saying Claude is bad, I still use it heavily at work and its CLI tooling is definitely the best out of what I've tried. I don't even touch the Codex CLI tooling, I use the desktop app because it works well, and when I first started using Codex they gave you double usage if you used the desktop app. That marketing worked, because I'm still using it. The main thing though is Codex seems to get to the point quicker, I don't have to hold its hand as much.

On top of that, Codex has been releasing more and more features that help it replace a lot of my other tools.

Normally I'd have my IDE open, a browser open, and then a separate AI app as well. The IDE would also be where terminals lived, where I'd look at Git, where I'd check diffs, all that stuff. The Codex desktop app has replaced most of that for me apart from the browser.

You can open a terminal directly in it, see changed files, branches, jump to PRs, and the diff viewer is properly good. It feels more like an actual IDE than just an AI chat app. Being able to jump between chats and projects quickly helps as well. It's also fast, which I appreciate because I used PHPStorm for a lot of this before and my god it feels slow in comparison.

Codex has made the more manual side of things a lot easier, and they have features like automations and the mobile app to help automate things a little further. My plan is to try and get it using my personal wiki a little more, and queuing up tasks for it in there for it to tackle on a schedule. More on that soon, as well as how I use my personal wiki to juggle AI stuff.