Please do elaborate. I’ve only tried switching to codex once or twice, and it’s been probably 3 months since I last tried it, but I was underwhelmed each time. Is it better on novel things in your experience?
My experience is that it is much more terse and realistic with its feedback, and more thoughtful generally. I trust its positive acknowledgements of my work more than claude, whose praise I have been trained to be extremely skeptical of.
In my experience, Codex / ChatGPT are better at telling you where you're wrong, where your assumptions are incomplete, etc., and better at following the system prompts.
But more importantly, as a coding agent, it follows instructions much better. I've frequently had Claude go off and do things I've explicitly told it not to do, or write too much code that did wrong things, and it's more work to corral it than I want to spend.
Codex will follow instructions better. Currently, it writes code that I find a few notches above Claude, though I'm working with C# and SQL so YMMV; Claude is terrible at coming up with decent schema. When your instructions do leave some leeway, I find the "judgment" of Codex to be better than Claude. And one little thing I like a lot is that it can look at adjacent code in your project so it can try to write idiomatically for your project/team. I haven't seen Claude exhibit this behavior and it writes very middle-of-the-road in terms of style and behavior.
But when I use them I use them in a very targeted fashion. If I ask them to find and fix a bug, it's going to have as much or more detail as a full bug report in my own ticketing system. If it's new code, it comes with a very detailed and long spec for what is needed, what is explicitly not needed, the scope, the constraints, what output is expected, etc., like it's a wiki page or epic for another real developer to work from. I don't do vague prompts or "agentic" workflow stuff.
I can confirm that basically all third-party apps have to handle this "Gmail weirdness" and come up with an abstraction layer to make Gmail IMAP accounts play nicely with "regular" IMAP accounts.
I don't mean to be contrarian, but this is completely false.
IMAP _seems_ to be a straightforward (but nasty and stateful) protocol, until you find out that every major provider ignores RFCs and does things slightly differently.
The deeper issue here isn't about Antigravity specifically. It's that email is most people's de facto digital identity. Every password reset, every 2FA recovery, every account verification flows through it. When a company can revoke access to your email over a ToS violation in a completely unrelated product, the stakes are disproportionate.
The fix is surprisingly straightforward: own your domain, use a provider that focuses on email, and keep your client separate from your provider. Standard IMAP means all three pieces are interchangeable. If one fails, swap it out.
(I work on Marco [0], an IMAP email client. The number of people looking to decouple from Gmail/Google has been growing steadily, definitely a current trend.)
EmailEngine author here. The commenter tried the EmailEngine trial back in 2024 and appears to have had a negative experience. Since then, he’s repeatedly criticized EmailEngine and related components like the ImapFlow IMAP library, often while promoting his own product.
It’s a great honor to be able to talk with Andris. A few months ago I learned that the author of EmailEngine not only created EmailEngine, but is also behind many foundational Node.js email libraries that are widely used. My own projects, RustMailer and Bichon, are built on the shoulders of many great Rust email libraries. EmailEngine is undoubtedly a success, and Andris has spent years quietly and diligently contributing to these core libraries. I have deep respect for you.
It's slow, unreliable, very feature-limited, and extremely expensive for what it is.
Especially these days, you could vibe-code something an order of magnitude better within a day or two and not be locked into a single author's rat's nest of code.
At this point, almost all new EmailEngine customers are AI startups. These are teams that know how to use LLMs well, which makes it interesting that they still opt for EmailEngine despite the extremely expensive $83/month price tag.
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