Codex vs Claude vs GLM 5.2: A Practical Comparison
The question I keep getting asked is which AI coding assistant I actually use day to day. The honest answer is that I use more than one, and the reason is that none of them is uniformly the best. Each one has a lane where it clearly wins, and each one has a failure mode that pushes me back to the others. This post is a practical comparison of three tools I have spent real time with: Codex, Claude, and GLM 5.2. I am not interested in benchmark scores or leaderboard positioning. I care about how these tools behave across the full lifecycle of a project: initial scaffolding, iterative refinement, design polish, and long-running reliability. The short version: GLM 5.2 has replaced Codex as my daily driver for implementation work. Codex failed the wife test, which is what pushed me to switch. Claude is strong on design and polish but showed a huge regression after two weeks of use. GLM 5.2 is great at identifying tiny lingering issues and regressions, but the last 24 hours of work showed...