I’ve got a custom ultra high performance streaming semantic search I exposed as a tool and the RL bias in Claude is almost insurmountable without copious and consistent steering. Codex will follow instructions and use the tools I ask it to but for gods sake between Claude asking to take a nap because it’s getting late in the session and it regressing to RL biased tools like grep it’s maddening. When I can get it to use my compositional tools tool calls drop from like 20-50 to 3-4, but it’s almost impossible to steer.
Anthropic is, I believe, fully pursuing the idea that you shouldn't use their model with anything but their own products. They don't care whether it generalizes.
I agree it's very frustrating to use with custom tools/harnesses that can speed up the process for domain specific purposes.
