If you let your inner fanboy rest for a moment you realize Gemini 3, Claude Opus 4.5, and GPT 5.2 are all amazing. If two of them disappeared tomorrow, my AI assisted productiveness wouldn't change.
The 3% difference on benchmark X doesn't mean anything anymore. It's probably more helpful to compare them on character traits instead of numbers.
My one word to describe Claude would be "pleasant". It's just so nice to communicate with. GPT/Codex would be the "thorough". It finds and thinks of stuff the others don't. For Gemini 3, the jury is still out. It might be the smart kid on the block that's still a bit rough around the edges, but given that it's a preview things might change soon.
Gemini 3 has this extremely annoying habit of bleeding its reasoning process onto comments which are hard to read and not very human-like (they're not "reasoning", they're "question for the sake of questioning", which I get as a part of the process, but not as a comment in the code!). I've seen it do things like these many times:
# Because so and so and so and so we must do x(param1=True, param2=False)
# Actually! No, wait! It is better if we do x(param1=True, param2=True)
x(param1=True, param2=True, param3=False) # This one is even better!
As for GPT 5.2, I just feel like it doesn't really follow my instructions or way of thinking. Like it's dead set on following whatever best practices it has learned, and if I disagree with them, well tough luck. Plus, and I have no better way of saying this, it's just rude and cold, and I hate it for it.
Gemini seems to lean to making everything a script, disconnected from the larger vision. Sure, it uses our existing libraries, but the files it writes and functions it makes can’t be integrated back in.
Codex is fast. Very fast. Which makes it great for a conversational UI, and answering questions about the codebasw or proposing alternatives but when it writes code it’s too clever. The code is valid but not pythonic. Like the invention of one line functions just to optimize a situation that had could be parameterized in three places.
Claude on the other hand makes code that is simple to understand and has enough architecture that you can lift it out and use as is without too much rewriting.