TLDR: Vibe coders/coding novices using AI for coding I have a painful lesson turned into a tip for you → Codex “ask” on your repo is your BEST source for how to do anything with your repo. Nothing else on the market will come close because the other AIs are guessing. I have not tried all the AIs but I’ve tried a lot of them. Codex does not guess. That’s what I wanted and what I needed. Answers. Not guesses.
My painful journey these past few weeks…
I wasted multiple DAYS of work (I mean 10+ hour days) working between Claude and ChatGPT trying to solve for an API call to my hosted GPTs using a Flowise (I highly recommend them). Both Claude and ChatGPT had me stuck in iteration prison (although I learned a lot). I am a coding novice. I have limited prior exposure using several coding language but only in special projects here and there over the years - nothing serious and no real mental foundation to build from. I’ve been attempting to use various coding AI tools (Cursor, ChatGPT-4o, 4.1, Gemini, Claude) and none of that can help me do anything more than tiny little apps (still super cool though).
A couple of tips:
(1) ChatGPT is a great teacher for step by step instructions but GPT-4o, GPT-4.1 seems to lack a compressive view of the code it builds. I think that is because of how it interacts with tools where it is somewhat blind to them. If you need step by step instructions, or you want to fix a small self-contained section of code it will work well but I would not try to make those models build you a complete anything. You will get stuck in iteration prison 
(2) Claude seems to be good at compressive coding but it is way to eager to write the whole thing. It’s bit like work working with Dall-e. Just one line and off the races and then it brings back something that is not what I wanted. Still though, a solid prompt and 5-10 iterations will get you something worthwhile.
(3a) Codex - Codex Code button → for a novice it’s a bit hard to use it’s core feature which seems to be recommending line-item coding changes that then I have to go change. For me, that is hard but still, very helpful.
(3b) Codex - Codex Ask button → this just fixed my problem. I am so happy about how well this worked that I just had to post this. If you want to understand a GitHub repo, clone it, and plug in Codex and use the Ask button. I’ve used several other AIs for the same work and nothing compares. I had a complex problem that Claudes and ChatGPTs and Googling and Discord and YouTube videos and (sigh) searching/skimming the documentations and repo code DID NOT solve. I wasted DAYS in iteration prison. Then, out of desperation, I tried yet another AI tool meant to help with coding…Codex. Plugged in the repo. Asked my question and got nothing useful. As expected. So then I asked it more directly and more specifically and what came out looked good but - NOTHING had worked before so I tried it … and… IT WORKED!!! I double checked the results. Then I ran it again. Then I checked it more because I literally could not believe my eyes.
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Happy vibe coding all the novices out there! Vibe coding is a lot harder than it sounds like but we are at the precipice and can easily build ourselves small functional apps to help automate tasks for ourselves. Do that. You will be glad you did!
Written by hand