Coding requires a mindset shift that the -codex fine-tunes provide. Codex will do all kinds of weird stuff like poking in your ~/.cargo ~/go etc. to find docs and trying out code in isolation, these things definitely improve capability.
The biggest advantage of codex variants, for me, is terseness and reduced sicophany. That, and presumably better adherence to requested output formats.
Codex talks much less than the standard variant, especially between tool calls.
Looks like they removed that line.
Hm, yeah, strange. You would not be able to tell, looking at every chart on the page. Obviously not a gotcha, they put it on the page themselves after all, but how does that make sense with those benchmarks?