and Codex are incredibly powerful coding agents by themselves. I’ve extensively tried both models, and in my opinion, they’re both very good and comparable, at least comparing the model Claude Opus 4.8 and Codex with GPT-5.5.
However, they definitely have different strengths and weaknesses. In some scenarios, I find myself using Claude, and in other scenarios, I find myself using Codex. In this article, I will discuss how I combine the two models and in which scenarios I utilize each of them.
It is important to note that the landscape of coding agents is moving incredibly quickly. You might see that either Claude Code or Codex is moving ahead of the other in the coming months, or even a third competitor coming up, such as Google with their Gemini models.
Why use Claude Code and Codex
First of all, the reason you should be using Claude Code and Codex is that they’re incredibly powerful coding agents. They can, of course, be used to complete programming tasks, but they can also be used to complete essentially any other office or computer-related tasks that you might work on.
For example, if you want:
- Set up a budget
- Create a PowerPoint
- Draft an email
Or any other such task, I try to apply coding agents to essentially all tasks that I do, instead of manually performing tasks myself on the computer. I try to make a coding agent complete the task. This can, for example, be setting up a new framework in your application instead of reading through the API and setting up everything in the UI. I instead fetch an API key and give it to my coding agent, and make the coding agent set up everything for me.
How I apply Claude Code and Codex
Now, in this section, I’ll discuss how I apply Claude Code and Codex, in which situations I use which, and what the different strengths and weaknesses are. Lastly, I’ll cover an extremely powerful technique that I’ve started actively using lately that gives me incredibly good results and helps the models build very robust code.
Scenarios in which I favor Claude Code
Firstly, I want to cover the scenarios in which I favor Claude Code. I would say my main coding agent driver when I’m interacting with the code myself is Claude Code. It’s the main go-to tool I use when making or writing code to solve problems on my computer.
This is because Claude Code is very robust. It’s very good at planning, asking me the right questions to clarify ambiguities, and making me aware of any big decisions that I need to make that will impact the solution the agent is building.
I also find that Claude Code has a lot of features that I really appreciate and sometimes miss from Codex. Overall, they’re not even that advanced features, but I just find that Claude Code is constantly ahead of Codex when it comes to the features in their CLI tool, which makes me favor Claude Code often.
These are features such as:
- Recap – Claude Code provides a recap at the bottom of the chat, which makes it really simple to pick up code and text again if you’ve been away from a Claude Code tab.
- Create worktrees on startup. In Claude Code, you can type -w, which will automatically create a worktree for the repository you’re working in. This is not currently possible in Codex.
- Workflows – Claude Code recently released a very powerful feature called Workflows, which allows you to spend a lot more tokens to complete more complex tasks. I find this very valuable to complete migrations, for example.
I’ve also experienced that Claude Code had some features a while ago that Codex has now picked up on. However, I think it’s a very general note I’d make that Claude Code is ahead on the features and usually publishes the best features first. In some scenarios, Codex implements those features at a later point.
Overall, I think Claude Code works well as the main driver for your coding agents. Most tasks that you want to do can be completed by Claude Code, which is also why I chose to have a Claude Code subscription. Furthermore, I also liked the UI in the Claude application for desktop, and I think Claude Cowork is a very good feature. Of course, OpenAI has a similar app, but I don’t think it’s as good and as well-designed.
If you are a non-technical user, I would definitely recommend using the Claude application.
Scenarios in which I favor Codex
Even though Claude Code is incredibly powerful as my main driver, there are a lot of use cases I use Codex for. First of all, I of course use Codex whenever Claude Code is down, which has happened a surprising number of times lately. You can see how often this has happened on the Claude Status page. We see that the Claude Code uptime is approaching 99.0%, which I would regard as quite poor performance.
However, Codex isn’t just good as a secondary alternative to Claude Code. It’s also incredibly valuable in other situations, like:
- Performing code reviews
- Powering OpenClaw bots
- Getting work done faster (fast mode)
The three points mentioned above are my three main reasons for choosing Codex when I do.
Firstly, I think Codex performs excellent code reviews, and they’ve made a very simple setup for you to perform code reviews with Codex. You can simply install it into your GitHub and tag it to perform a code review.
Secondly, I think Codex is probably the best alternative you have for powering your OpenClaw bots. The reason is that you can power your OpenClaw bots through a Codex subscription, which you cannot do with Claude Code anymore. I believe that this is basically the highest intelligence you can get, considering Codex is a frontier LLM. It’s on a subscription basis, which makes it quite cheap to run OpenClaw bots like this. I can both run Codex as a programming or coding agent on my own computer and have it power multiple OpenClaw bots without hitting limits.
OpenAI limits are really generous, as I mentioned in my last paragraph. Additionally, OpenAI also offers something called fast mode, which makes the coding agent faster without sacrificing quality at all. This is an option you can have where the agent will be around 50% faster, and you’ll spend about twice as much of your token limit. However, I find that I’m rarely hitting the OpenAI token limits, so using fast mode is overall a great alternative.
I also believe OpenAI’s Codex is more efficient at solving a lot of tasks, even if you don’t use fast mode. Lastly, I also think Codex is somewhat better at following pure instructions from the user. I do find that Claude Code, in some scenarios, performs work I don’t want to perform, and I rarely encounter this issue with OpenAI’s Codex.
Combining Claude Code and Codex
Lastly, I also want to cover a small section on combining Claude Code and Codex into the same coding session. One very powerful technique I’ve developed and found that works really well:
I make Claude Code perform my initial planning and code execution to implement the solution. I then make my Claude Code tag OpenAI’s Codex in a PR to review the code that Claude has made. In many cases, I find that Codex is able to discover issues that Claude wasn’t aware of, but that Claude Code agrees with after looking at Codex’s presentation of the issue. I then make Claude Code automatically fix the issue from Codex and re-request review. Have them iterate together like that until the review from OpenAI’s Codex goes through as all good.
This is a very simple setup, as you can simply prompt Claude Code to act in this way after you’ve installed OpenAI’s Codex into your repository. This has uncovered a large number of bugs for me that Claude Code introduced when it wrote the code, and it would have been brought to production if it weren’t for either Codex performing the review or having a human review. However, having human reviews now is, of course, not possible anymore, given the amount of code we’re producing.
I believe combining OpenAI’s Codex with Claude Code is a way to write even better code and get the best out of both the coding agents and even more. I believe combining these two models provides value that goes above the sum of its parts.
Conclusion
In this article, I have discussed how to combine Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex for maximum coding efficiency and power. I discussed why you should be using Claude Code and Codex, which is obviously to save time and perform work more efficiently. I then discussed in which scenarios I favor Claude Code and in which scenarios I favor OpenAI’s Codex. They definitely have strengths in different areas, which is great if you are a user of both platforms, as you can choose to use a platform that works best for any given task. Lastly, I also covered a very powerful technique where I combine both Claude Code and Codex to write incredibly robust code and discover issues before they come to production. I believe you, as a developer, should definitely be paying close attention to the coding agent space and trying out any new models that come out, such as the Claude Opus 4.8 model that was released a few days ago.
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