Codex vs Claude Code: 30 days of OpenAI releases against Opus 5.5

By Rafa and Pablo · Café con Codely

This week Codex ships many new features, and Claude Code does too. Rafa and Pablo test the two agents. They give a warning about bias: Claude Code is their daily tool for a long time. Javi prefers Codex, but he is not in this stream.

Rafa gives a short history. In 2025, Cursor leads with its agent mode. Claude Code arrives around May and wins the developers who work in the terminal. With Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.6, Claude Code takes the lead. Then Opus gets worse, and Codex gets users because you almost never hit its limits. With Opus 5.5, Claude Code uses far fewer tokens, and the situation changes again.

OpenAI replies with 30 days of releases in a row, as Tibo announces. GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol are 50% faster. The Codex subscription works in third-party tools, which Anthropic does not allow. The auto review mode is now free. The Decisions API, remote SSH sessions with Tailscale and instant steering also arrive.

The verdict: the Codex desktop app has a better UX than the Claude Code app. It has good animations, an integrated browser and Image Gen to generate images. But for coding, Opus 5.5 gives better results than any current model, Astra Max included. Pablo misses the Codex steering: Claude Code now sends a message at once with Ctrl+Enter, but you cannot choose the queue as the default. Watch in the video.

JetBrains reports a loss for the first time in its history

Rafa shows the JetBrains chart from 2005, in Czech koruna. Revenue continues to grow, but 2025 is the first year with a negative result. Rafa says that JetBrains invests a lot in AI and tries many products: Junie, Fleet, Air and more. Users do not understand the offer, and the IDE collects bugs.

Rafa almost never opens IntelliJ now: he does the review on GitHub or asks Claude Code for the changes. To see the Git diff, he uses Rebased, a free IntelliJ Community fork that keeps only the Git part. Pablo now uses VS Code. For Rafa, JetBrains needs its own model, as Cursor has with Composer. Watch in the video.

Haiku 5.5: the price of Luna up to 100,000 tokens, but with a catch

Anthropic releases Haiku 5.5 on October 7, almost one year after Haiku 4.5. Its benchmarks double those of Haiku 4.5 and beat Luna. The price is the same as Luna: $0.10 input and $0.50 output per million tokens. But above 100,000 tokens, the price is five times higher. Luna only increases its price above 272,000 tokens.

The biggest catch is the tokenizer: Simon Willison measures 25% more tokens than Haiku 4.5. In Pablo's eval with five models, Haiku 5.5 uses more tokens than all of them, but it costs less than Sonnet 5.5 and Sol. Also, the $100 Max plan now includes $100 of API credits per month, and the $200 plan includes $200. Watch in the video.

The utility of the week

LinearMouse

This week the AI chooses it, from seven candidates. LinearMouse configures each macOS mouse and trackpad separately. You can reverse the scroll only on the mouse and keep natural scrolling on the trackpad. It also configures the MX Master buttons without Logi Options and gives you the trackpad zoom with Cmd + wheel. The AI chooses it because it fixes a daily friction and it is free.

https://linearmouse.app

The chat weighs in

mcruffian: What I do not understand is why agents do not use their own system user, under the control of the sysadmin as always

cololeo: Haiku 5.5 works very well and costs almost nothing for small tasks

josearrocha4813: voxtype has a very good implementation for Linux environments like Arch

Agenda

Startup OLÉ '26 · 2026-10-13
EuroRust 2026 · 2026-10-14
APIAddictsDays26 · 2026-10-15
WordCamp Galicia 2026 · 2026-10-16
MorcillaConf 2026 · 2026-10-16
Software Crafters Barcelona 2026, with a live café · 2026-10-16

The song of the week

Pablo: «Tears Dry on Their Own» — Amy Winehouse (His favorite song from Back to Black, one of the best albums of the 21st century, which turns 20 this year.) Watch in the video.

Rafa: «ABC (feat. Sophia Black)» — Polyphia (Pure guitar with the voice of Sophia Black.) Watch in the video.

The café's music playlist: cdly.to/playlist

The saying of the week

«Charity begins at home»

The Spanish version says that well-understood charity starts with yourself. Before you look after the needs of others, look after your own needs. Watch in the video.

More Codely

Jev y modelos System One: Usos prácticos

The new course to use Jev and System One models in your applications. It compares Jev with an LLM for database searches and uses evals to decide when each one makes sense.

The joke of the week: What is the font of truth? Times New Roman 12, because it is the font of all legal documents.

All the news we covered

#CaféConCodely · @CodelyTV · Previous cafés: cdly.to/cafe

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