I have two Opus 5.5 agents working in NLC right now.
One is reviewing the codebase. The other is helping me map the context my agents inherit when they pick up ongoing work.
The first few interactions had friction, so I expected more of the Claude I had been fighting for months.
Opus 5 made every instruction feel like the start of an argument. Ask it to do something and it would find a reason to object. A warning, a criticism, a new angle, a supposedly better idea. By the time it had finished explaining itself, I had more work rather than less.
That was especially frustrating because Claude has always been easy to talk to when it is behaving well. Opus 5 took that strength and made it adversarial. There was a finger wag waiting around every corner.
The difference with Opus 5.5 is hard to miss.
It still offers perspective and can point out something I have not considered. Yet it does the work without complaining about every step, and it accepts a correction without turning that correction into another fight.
The execution weaknesses have not vanished. Claude can still get lazy, stop far too soon, hand part of the job back to me, and act as if a fraction of the job is finished. I still need to push it through a task.
That is where Codex remains ahead for me.
Codex agents are much more rigorous: they catch things Claude misses and work harder. For serious work, that is exactly what I want.
Unfortunately, Codex agents still talk like idiots.
They can do strong engineering work, then report back in a way that is overcomplicated, tone-deaf and painful to decipher. You get the better worker, then have to deal with the world’s worst colleague in the debrief.
The comparison now feels useful again. Codex gives me more rigorous execution. Claude is once more providing a conversation I can actually inhabit, while still bringing a perspective of its own.
With Opus 5, that second bargain was barely a bargain at all. Claude was too combative to be worth it. Opus 5.5 has changed that enough for me to pay attention.
If Anthropic keeps going in this direction, I think a lot of people will come back.
I probably will too.
FELIX