8 ms·

while everyone is somehow still stuck on and fascinated by claude, heres your quick update on the sota of coding models and harnesses mid august 2026 codex is

• xianshou 26d ago
  the future is here and one should be thankful for its slightly uneven distribution. otherwise we would hardly have anything left about which to develop strong opinions!
• trjordan 26d ago
  Not mentioning Grok 4.6 here is a crime. Fast and accurate. And it can communicate, unlike the gobbledygook that comes out of Claude.
  • ceejayoz 26d ago
    > Not mentioning Grok 4.6 here is a crime. Not yet. Don't give the guy ideas.
  • king_crimson 26d ago
    Been working a lot recently with Grok 4.6 for implementation and gpt 5.6 sol for review. Worked really good so far.
    • jmaker 26d ago
      Why not the other way around?
  • felixgallo 26d ago
    [flagged]
    • kev009 26d ago
      [flagged]
      • esalman 26d ago
        Let me give you an example of the money laundering operation. Due to USAID shutdown, Bangladesh went from ~$500M in US assistance to ~$71M, with bilateral health funding dropping ~97% in some analyses. Over 100 projects (~$550M) suspended overnight. 20k–50k development workers laid off (1,000+ at icddr,b, an award winning health research institution alone). TB programs (major USAID focus) largely halted. Bangladesh is high-burden; prior gains in case detection and falling death rates are at risk of reversing, plus higher chance of drug resistance from incomplete treatment. Immunization, maternal/child health, community clinics, nutrition, water/sanitation, and gender-based violence services sharply reduced. Child protection funding down ~36%. Food rations in Rohinhya camp, the largest refugee camp in the world, halved for >1M people; health and education services cut. Now you can argue that US does not have any kind of obligation to send 500M to Bangladesh. But it sent it anyway, for years, and then DJT came and broke promises. The inflated price you pay at gas station, groceries, and in interest when you're borrowing money, is a result of those broken promises.
        • Auracle 26d ago
          I’m sorry, but if I’m giving someone who is - at best - an acquaintance of mine $50 a month out of the goodness of my heart and then one day decide to stop, that’s not a broken promise. If that acquaintance got angry at me about stopping I’d get pretty upset back. I really don’t understand what link you think there is between USAID spending being cut and inflation. Gas prices are obviously Iran. Everything else started years ago.
          • esalman 26d ago
            Inflation is high because interest rates are high. Interest rates are high because top holders of US Treasury bonds like Japan, UK, China, are all dumping bonds. Why do you think they're doing that?
  • bdangubic 26d ago
    I would not use Grok if it paid me per token… wild wild stuff…
  • mediaman 26d ago
    As a coda to this, anyone using grok 4.6 via API pricing should be aware that while their headline pricing is good, the pricing that actually matters is pretty bad. Their cache read costs are $0.50 per million, or 25% of the cost of uncached reads. The industry standard is a 90% discount, so cache costs you 10% of uncached. So that means 5.6 Sol actually costs less per million cache reads - $0.40/million. If you are doing a lot of agentic work where the vast bulk of your token consumption will be cached input reads, you won't get the expected cost savings from Grok. I imagine this is the result of some problem in their serving infrastructure that I hope they will fix, because then the pricing will become actually strong. (The other possibility is that they bet on distracting people with good headline prices assuming they'd miss the bad cache pricing, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that.)
    • thefourthchime 25d ago
      I’ll agree with this. I liked grok build, but cost-wise, it’s just not competitive with cursor and codex Personally, I’ve switched to cursor ultra, which picks between about five models to do whatever you want. It's weird not to pick the best model all the time, if you can. But I got so frustrated with GPT-5.6 spending forever and then doing the wrong thing and making bugs. I'd rather have auto do the wrong thing fast and make bugs and then it can fix them. It's a trade-off, but I found the speed better. And you can always switch to a better model if you don't trust It.
  • logicallee 25d ago
    I agree that it's fast and accurate, but Grok 4.6 was released only 10 days ago so you can't blame someone for not trying it yet. (Versus many months at the frontier level for Claude and ChatGPT.) Here's a quick review I just posted if anyone's interested: https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/aug2026/grok-4-6-review/ https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/aug2026/grok-4-6-review/
  • nnevatie 25d ago
    Grok, is this true?
  • alasdair_ 25d ago
    Elon burned too many bridges to warrant ever supporting anything he is associated with ever again.
    • timr 25d ago
      Sure, you can let politics dominate everything you do. Or you can realize that SpaceX is a massive (public) company with thousands of employees, and millions of shareholders, all of whom have their own opinions and goals, just like any other corporation. Competition is good. Excluding a leading player in the market because you don’t like Elon Musk is…something.
      • seanmcdirmid 25d ago
        If politics isn’t a concern, why not just use deepseek?
        • timr 25d ago
          I am trying all of them. At this time, for me, Grok hits the sweet spot of quality, speed, cost and ease of use. I’m absolutely “hot money” when it comes to coding models. These things are commodities.
          • thefourthchime 25d ago
            I recently tried a Cursor ultra and Grokbot. Holy shit, dude. Half the coding I do is for my phone now because Cursor Ultra agents have their own VMs that are spun up specifically for each project. Grok bot has a bunch of agents that'll share a VM and they can do pretty much anything you can do digitally. Right on I have them checking slick deals every morning for a pellet smoker. I had it book a date night for me. I had it fix one of my projects by rebuilding my website and republishing it and then checking one of the container runs to see if it has errors on it. I had a call different banks to figure out which phone navigation tree to get through and put someone on the phone for me, and then call me The list just goes on and on.
        • 25d ago
• sejje 26d ago
  I think harness/model pairs matter more than your analysis lets on. I've had great luck with the ds flash v4, paired with prime-agent for the harness--I like the results a lot. And you get to see thinking tokens. I haven't liked the model as much in opencode. Sol & luna have been great everywhere. sol plans, luna builds.
  • hedgehog 26d ago
    Prime Agent looks really interesting. Both the "recursive language model" bit and routing everything through IPython. https://github.com/PrimeIntellect-ai/prime-agent https://github.com/PrimeIntellect-ai/prime-agent
    • sejje 26d ago
      It may be ipython making it work well with ds flash, too. I haven't really run many separate experiments, to be honest. I also like prime-agent's way of handling sessions better than any other harness i've used. You can run multiple agents from one instance, although the scoping could be better. But they can interact with past sessions, so preserving context isn't as important all the time. I just tell them to search for [thing] in another session. It seems to have no problem with all the skills and things the other harnesses are using. I use superpowers and ponytail a lot. It's my daily driver now. I like it better than opencode. But it doesn't ask permission. So I put it in a VM.
• ibramGaunt 26d ago
  My token usage on Claude models has dropped by 83% over the last month - I'm pretty much only using it for quick one off questions or reading papers. it feels impossible for me to get Opus models to stop entering into cyclic loops, and my work is too security adjacent for Fable. Codex has been an excellent workhorse - doesn't feel like I have to dance around the guardrails, doesn't lose _everything_ when it compacts, and doesn't litter the workspace with a million and one planning to plan files.
  • roamerz 26d ago
    I have to agree with you there. I did some good work with Claude then Fable came out - impressed with that as well. Then they dropped access to it and upon returning was never the same - even the Opus models for some reason. Then one day I burned through my limit in about 10 minutes and had to get a project completed. I subscribed to Codex and it has been fantastic - finished my project and continued on to others. I just dropped my Claude max plan down to the pro and subscribed to the $200 plan on Codex.
    • deleted 26d ago
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    • jmaker 26d ago
      I don’t get Claude, and that’s almost exactly what I did - I dropped to Claude Pro $20 + Codex Pro $100, and then unsubscribed from Claude and ramped up Codex. The Claude Pro is consumed within an hour on a simple task. I wish only Codex worked a bit faster than on the Fast mode. I used to rely on Fable for research when it was first out, today it doesn’t seem to be much better than Opus, and it uses up the quota exceptionally fast - 1h Fable in a single short session, and there’s little left for Opus to hit the 5h limit in a second session. With Opus I get about 3-5h of relaxed use with a couple subagents to save the context, but there’s usually quite some disagreement between the subagents and orchestrator - Claude does some model routing with default agents and picks Haiku and Sonnet for subtasks - only later to disagree with them and redo the work - and burn extra tokens. With Claude, it’s really either Opus or Fable if you want some quality. That said, their marketing is exceptionally effective. Virtually all nontech folks consider only Claude.
• rc1 26d ago
  [dead]
• nateb2022 26d ago
  > ds pro and flash are fast but not something id actually use for important things, unlike sol, fable and maybe 3.7 here and there As someone who's used Gemini 3.7 Flash (Google sub mostly for the storage) and DS4 Flash a lot (~6B tokens), I'd actually place DS4 Flash (even pre-0713) above Gemini 3.7 Flash. Gemini has a tendency to leave some things unimplemented; perhaps it's agy which frankly leaves a bit to be desired as a harness. Although I will praise DS4 Flash any day, it no longer makes sense for me after the price increase (GPT 5.6 Luna is a much better price point) and I have completely migrated my high volume workflows to Muse Spark 1.2 Contributor (which I find to perform better than DS4 Flash 0713, happily).
• tecoholic 26d ago
  > gemini 3.7 is great for speed. everyone is sleeping on it Is this Gemini 3.7 Flash by any chance? Then - No. Not sleeping on it. It’s just not good. I had a Python package build fail this week due to an unpinned dependency. Gave it to Gemini spent 5-7mins before I noticed it going off in some tangent. Reran with Claude Opus 4.8 - fixed in under a minute. I know anecdata of one. But something like this has happened every time I test a new model from Google.
• lifty 26d ago
  Unfortunately the codex plans don’t offer the same amount of tokens as they did before. This changed around a week ago. There’s been a lot of user reports noticing this issue, and I’ve noticed the same pattern on my account. Previously I would never reach my weekly quota but last week I managed to finish it it one day. Same project, same single session sequential work. Not sure if there’s an issue or if it’s on purpose, and not even sure it applied to all accounts. Curious if other users on HN noticed the same problem.
• kev009 26d ago
  Claude code seems like a beginner's trap at this point.
• jmaker 26d ago
  I don’t get how Claude is considered providing “unlimited” quotas. I use up my 5h on Max $100 and Team Premium in 2-3h of relaxed use of Opus 5 high+ on fresh sessions with just a couple skills/plugins. And my weekly quotas are gone in 3 days of such relaxed use. With Codex my $100 weekly quota is used up within 3 days with Sol high+ too. Im not convinced to pay $200 for Claude’s models. With Claude, I have to intervene every 15-20 minutes, it’s non-autonomous and it’s incredibly unreliable at self-correction. GPT is strong at self-correction but it tends to drift away from the plan to self-correct in a loop very often - a lot of tokens and time burnt on aimless churn. Opus tends to push its uninformed opinions and fake retrieval, drifting every turn increasingly farther from the intended and approved design. Opus skims over specs and makes too many mistakes. As for closed frontier models, I prefer the GPT models over Claude’s. I’ve started relying more on Grok, GLM, Kimi and DeepSeek models for subagents - I’ve ended up with a factory and am seeking to reduce my reliance on the closed frontier models - they’re just not SoTA on their own for development anymore.
  • zarzavat 25d ago
    You may be causing a lot of cache misses. You have to use the caching efficiently otherwise you can burn up any plan in any amount of time.
    • oblio 25d ago
      How do you use the cache efficiently?
      • eulo__ 25d ago
        I’m currently running /compact “explain the core next step” whenever over 20% context. Also doing /clear with a md file handover if I think the next input is diverse enough from the previous work. You get a lot more out of it. Not sure if this is best practice though.
      • zarzavat 25d ago
        You have to keep your session warm in cache. Keep the AI talking/thinking. If you have not touched a session for few minutes then /clear and start a new session. Providers will generally keep your session in cache for at least 5 minutes, possibly hours. The exact cache policy depends on the provider. If your session expires from cache then the next time you send a message you will have to pay for all the tokens you had used in context up until that point again. e.g. if you have 200k tokens in context then if your session goes cold and you send a message after expiry you will have to pay for those 200k tokens again. With 1M contexts especially you have to be extremely careful that you don't end up resubmitting requests for hundreds of thousands of tokens again and again. Try to get yourself and the model to use disk for medium-term context rather than model context, that way it's much easier to /clear and restart if you need to go to the bathroom or something.
• c0rruptbytes 25d ago
  Pi by itself is more than capable, OMP is okay but you really don't need much for a great harness (these models are RL trained to hell to be a coding agent, sometimes less is more) I run a lot of SlopCodeBench - https://github.com/michaelasper/benchmarks https://github.com/michaelasper/benchmarks Fable/Sol/GLM 5.3/Kimi are its league (in that order) Deepseek/Opus is solid Qwen 27B is the floor - there's no reason to use Sonnet/Terra/Haiku For everyday activity - I don't think you need to be using Sol (xhigh) for everything - unless you're made of money - I've found using Luna from OpenAI to be more than enough - it'll outreach to Opus/Sol when it needs to Haven't had access to Gemini 3.7 but we're getting it at work soon, will give it a go! Codex CLI is pretty bare bones in a bad way (at least Pi is extensible). Claude code is vibeslopped to the extreme
  • vardalab 25d ago
    Using Sol XHigh or even High will deplete the Pro sub pretty fast in my experience if one is running any sort of automations in their harnesses. Sol-medium lets me squeek by with it using lesser subagents. Using ninfer on 5090 and 35BA3B qwen 3.6 is also kind of cool to get a local cerebras experience at 600 tk/, it does make errors so 27B is actually faster at the end at 140-150 tk/s. 35B is great though at digging through session logs and such at high speed.
    • Makson179 25d ago
      Effort level might not be the root of the problem. In my runs reasoning is around 10% of the cost and writing code maybe 20%. The rest is 5.6 re-reading files. Model itself became way too meticulous.
  • andai 25d ago
    > you really don't need much for a great harness (these models are RL trained to hell to be a coding agent, sometimes less is more) To be precise, you need a while-loop, user input and bash. It's about 50 lines of Python: https://minimal-agent.com/ https://minimal-agent.com/ I built my own agent based on this and use it every day.
  • ValentineC 25d ago
• deleted 25d ago
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• timr 25d ago
  [flagged]
  • artdigital 25d ago
    With you on that, but it’s hard to justify giving $100 to Grok over $100 to Claude or Codex. It’s very good but what you get for the value is just objectively (still) worse compared to the other 2
    • timr 25d ago
      Shrug. All I can say is that my experience was that I was regularly hitting Codex’ limits, and I don’t with Grok. So much of this depends on your style, language and other more subjective factors. Codex has been really doling out the resets lately, which is fine, but I don’t consider that “real” usage limits.
  • tene80i 25d ago
    > “I realize that there’s a population of people who just refuse to use anything associated with Musk because politics have eaten our brains” People have values. Many people strongly disapprove of Musk’s actions. Many don’t - fine! Personal choice. But for people who do, refusing to support him commercially is hardly brain-eaten territory. There’s plenty of competition, and competition isn’t the only value at play.
    • timr 25d ago
      Yeah, OK. You’re making excuses for letting politics eat your life. Enjoy yourself, I guess. Setting aside the actual legitimacy of whatever complaints you have about Musk, you aren’t “supporting” him by using Grok, any more than you’re “supporting Xi Jinping” by using DeepSeek, or “supporting Jeff Bezos” by using Amazon, or “supporting the CEO of Exxon” by using energy. Or “supporting” any of a million other people you probably don’t like simply by existing in the world as a consumer. What you’re actually doing is called spitting in the wind. Major conglomerate providers of commodities are not controlled, or even operated to the benefit of, any single person. Musk is the operating officer of a corporation of many thousands of individuals. He has shares in that company, but so do millions of other people. It would be far more rational if you could point to some specific “evil” thing SpaceX is doing as a company that you oppose, but you can’t even do that. It’s all gotta be about one guy who you don’t like.
• MuffinFlavored 25d ago
  > you get lots of usage on any plan. I hit my weekly limit on $200/mo Codex plan in about ~2 days. :/ I'm not doing anything custom/crazy/special. A lot of 5.6 Sol Ultra though, I'll give you that.
  • Aurornis 25d ago
    > I'm not doing anything custom/crazy/special. A lot of 5.6 Sol Ultra though If you're not doing anything special there is no reason to use the Ultra mode. Ultra mode is for applying the maximum amount of tokens to a problem without regard to conserving any quota.
    • jimmaswell 25d ago
      Max and Ultra are fantastic for the more complex problems where they shine. I use them strategically on certain classes of problems, one or the other depending how parallelizable it is. I've found it consistently amazing at game dev. It sounds like something that would be difficult for an LLM to verify and iterate on properly, but it almost feels like having a mini-Carmack inside your computer once you try it out. You can throw it at broad, sweeping optimization passes, writing 5 different styles of eyesight sensor frameworks to see what works best in the game as it is, visual scripting integration problems/extensions, etc. with fantastic results. Also found Ultra great for "get this local LLM working as fast as possible on this odd server setup with old GPUs and AMX support, writing custom kernels/modifications to llama.cpp/sglang/etc as you go while taking notes from relevant research papers and online posts"
• deleted 25d ago
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• qurren 25d ago
  Any opinions (by anyone really) on how much I can trust Claude vs. Codex (vs. something else) to not leak my coding conversations or use them for training? I have the appropriate privacy settings set up but wondering how much I can trust each company with them.
  • inquirerGeneral 25d ago
    [dead]
  • gorgolo 25d ago
    I’ve been using codex more recently, like others here. But one thing I’ve noticed which I find a bit of a red flag: by default you only archive chats. If you go online, it says there’s a location in settings where can delete your archive. But it’s not that obvious where to find, and when I finally find some link, it was literally broken. It said it can’t find any archived chats, even though I archive them all the time. Bit of a red flag for me. Both Anthropic and OpenAI claim that when you delete a chat, it’s gone after some retention period. They’re just words but if they’re secretly training on your traces and you delete your chats, then they would need to break two terms/conditions: ignoring your “train on my data” preference and ignoring your orders to delete chats. So it is an extra barrier. But OpenAI, as far as I can tell, doesn’t let you delete your chats. Convenient then if they change their mind about training sometime in the future.
  • shostack 25d ago
    For individual use without specially negotiated Enterprise stuff I can't afford both offer contractual assurances of not using your data for training or ads and measurement and selling your data. But these are not the same level of technical assurance you get from say, a zero data retention provider on OpenRouter. Right now I am finding I have to tolerate substantial friction to use Hermes for personal stuff with a ZDR provider and ChatGPT and Codex for less personal stuff because the products and models are simply so much better.
• brcmthrowaway 25d ago
  Just use qwen3.8-27b on a Mac with oMLX, ANE enabled and skip cloud models.
• solarkraft 25d ago
  > gemini 3.7 is great for speed Does this mean it can break your code faster now, or have they actually worked on making it good? Every single time I've given Gemini a chance (in older point versions) it would almost immediately break something and throw itself into a loop. I have not experienced it being useful for programming and almost never heard an account of somebody else doing so. Remember those stories of LLMs catastrophically deleting entire repositories or databases? It was always Gemini. I'm amazed that you'd trust Gemini over DeepSeek, which I've had very good experiences with after some tuning, though still on a relatively short leash.
  • vrosas 25d ago
    3.6+ have been fine for me. They still introduce bugs but at least they don’t make you wait an hour for them like Claude does.
• NooneAtAll3 25d ago
  deepseek?
• pimeys 25d ago
  I've been using all the SOTA models a lot at work, like serious amount of tokens. It's been really rare that I stick with one model and harness for too long... Except a month ago I started testing Kimi K3 and omp and I never went back. Something with this combo works really well for Rust dev. The model doesn't really annoy me at all and I have not switched to Opus or SOL. And the monthly token bill is much lower...
• totalhack 25d ago
  Gemini 3.7 may have fast token output but holy cow does it waste it on useless output. Several times now I've given it a shot and watched it's reasoning trace go through a bunch of unnecessary / off-target steps relative to what I asked. Don't have this issue with 5.6 models. MAI Code 1.1 is also solid and fast for non-complex tasks.
• rr808 25d ago
  Copilot and Devin. They're actually really good too.
• SomeHacker44 25d ago
  Sorry, what does "everyone is sleeping on it" mean?
  • data-ottawa 25d ago
    It is under-utilized and not getting the attention it deserves.
  • shnock 25d ago
    It's receiving less attention than it merits
• Bluestein 25d ago
  OMP is great, testify.- jcode is a very very peculiar harness, but has some out-of-the-box thinking built in (by the devs, thinking ...) Crush is also very well put together, and, IIRC, can do "mid turn" interruption, so can be driven from the outside.-
• applicative 25d ago
  I don't think 'enterprise' is quite ready for > kimi k3 - one of the few models thats willing to commit crimes for you