when

• started 2026 March 18
• last update 2026 April 29
• experiment concluded on 2026 April 29

what

• a science project to learn how to use AI and research what it can do

scope

• as a toy project I picked to implement the AV1 video encoder/decoder based on the specs at https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-spec/av1-spec.pdf

results

	status	url
Claude	✅ done, success	https://github.com/codemodify/av1go-claude
Codex	✅ done, success	https://github.com/codemodify/av1go-codex
Grok	❌ done, failed	https://github.com/codemodify/av1go-grok
Gemini	❌ done, failed	https://github.com/codemodify/av1go-gemini

	personal remarks (so far)
Claude	worked surprisingly well, almost magically reads your mind, as of today (2026 April 12) it got nerfed
Codex	knows low level stuff, a bit grumpy and likes being baby-sited at times, 5.4 failed miserably similar to Gemini below, after switched to 5.5 it worked wonders, the videos play, I stopped at playing 90% with some glitches but the conclusion is that if I keep going with 5.5 it will succeed as it make a radical difference since started to use it
Grok	it is honest, does not waste your time, for now it's good for light projects with answers from Stack Overflow or similar
Gemini	out of control hallucinations, a wild horse doing whatever it wants, appears to start well but in reality it just bluffs, talks sweet but results are lacking - it just burns tokens, use Grok instead for now, complains a lot, forgets what we spoke 5 min ago, hogs the CPU, crashes a lot, it took a complete crash and a forced restart to analyze its own coding to acknowledge it broke the implementation few iterations ago and we've been headed for the last day into a wrong direction, it did this to me a few times, overall probably a smart attempt from Google to not follow the crowd but have a dedicated IDE, for now useful for light tasks only, this is probably normal for a Beta but no good for actual work. After taking me to strange roads for days it tells me this was all a pretend. I got the receipts, see screens. At this point this is worse than saying "dude you are nuts I'm not ready for this project" like Grok did.