Codex Does Too Much Busywork in Large Projects
Chipware · reddit · 2026-07-14
Comparing Claude Opus/Fable and Codex/GPT5.6 on large coding projects, the author's biggest takeaway is that Codex often looks busy but lacks actual output efficiency.
Typical behaviors described include:
- Spending a lot of time on prep work
- Writing a little bit of code occasionally
- Devoting most of the time to testing and verification
- Spending 20% of the time coding and 80% on looping, unproductive actions
Even when using /goal, Codex forgets the objective after context compression and requires manual intervention and reminders to actually start working. In contrast, the author finds Claude's status updates more purposeful and better at explaining the "why" behind its actions.
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