{"id":489839,"date":"2026-05-17T23:46:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-17T23:46:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/489839\/"},"modified":"2026-05-17T23:46:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-17T23:46:15","slug":"i-use-claude-code-and-codex-together-and-the-combination-does-something-neither-can-do-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/489839\/","title":{"rendered":"I use Claude Code and Codex together, and the combination does something neither can do alone"},"content":{"rendered":"

When you see Claude Code and Codex in the same sentence, there’s a good chance the article you’re reading or the video you’re watching is about to pit them against each other. I’m not going to pretend I haven’t done that before either. I’ve been using Claude Code for far longer than Codex, and I’ve written about my experience using both tools for the same tasks (and there’ve been times when Claude Code has beaten Codex, and times when it’s gone the other way).<\/p>\n

What I haven’t written about, and what barely no one is, is what happens when you stop running them against each other and start running them together. I’ve now come to realize that that’s exactly where the interesting stuff is.<\/p>\n

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I use Claude Max and Codex’s $20 plan<\/p>\n

$100 for the workhorse, $20 for the second opinion<\/p>\n

\"claude<\/p>\n

Like I just mentioned above, I’ve been using Claude Code for a longer time and only recently started exploring what Codex actually has to offer. When I tried out Codex in its early days, I wasn’t all that impressed. It felt slower, more cautious, and weirdly reluctant to just do the thing I’d asked it to do. Claude Code, by contrast, would just go. I gave it a shot again recently<\/a>, and was seriously impressed.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, when I first tried out Claude Code on the Pro plan, I realized that the limits on it simply wouldn’t cut it, and understood that the Max tier was the only way to go. I decided to start off with Codex in the same way: get ChatGPT’s $20 Plus tier first, and only upgrade if the limits got in the way. They haven’t! So for now, I’m using Claude’s 5x Max tier, which retails for $100\/month, along with ChatGPT’s $20 Plus plan.<\/p>\n

I give each model the same task, and pick whichever I like more<\/p>\n

The losing diff is still useful<\/p>\n

\"Codex<\/p>\n

Now, while hourly and weekly limits certainly matter, the main selling point of these subscriptions is always what powers them: the models behind them. And this is where giving both agents the same task starts to pay off, because Claude Code and Codex aren’t just two CLIs with different keybindings. They’re two different model families, trained differently, with different instincts about what “good code” looks like. Just as one developer will have a different approach to a problem than another developer, Claude Code and Codex will reach for different solutions to the same prompt.<\/p>\n

There are times when they end up with more or less the same solution, and times when one of them sees something the other missed entirely. Beyond the actual solution, Claude Code and Codex bring different instincts to the same task as well. Codex tends to move fast and trust itself, acting akin to a senior developer that knows what it’s doing. On the other hand, Claude Code tends to ask for your advice a lot more, just to make sure what it’s doing lands. Again, two very different directions \u2014 which is exactly why running them on the same task surfaces things neither would on its own.<\/p>\n

Claude Code has taste, Codex has patience<\/p>\n

The more you use each tool, the more you’ll realize that each tool and model family excels at different kinds of problems. For me, the split has settled into something pretty clean: Claude Code for anything UI- or design-heavy, Codex for anything that requires sitting with a problem until it cracks. Again, in these situations, I’m always using them in parallel.<\/p>\n

I’m a fan of the aesthetic design choices Claude Code makes, so I almost always ask it to handle anything visual. If I need a landing page, a new component, or a redesign of an existing flow, Claude Code is in the worktree. The taste it has for spacing, hierarchy, and restraint is something I’ve never gotten from Codex without a lot of back-and-forth. Codex’s strengths are in the opposite direction: the patient, unglamorous work of figuring out what’s actually broken.<\/p>\n

I have them review each other’s work<\/p>\n

Nobody grades their own homework<\/p>\n

\"macos<\/p>\n

Imagine if someone did a college assignment, and you had the same person who wrote it grade it. Unless they really look down on themselves and think they didn’t do a good job, they’d give themselves an A without thinking twice. This wouldn’t necessarily be because they’re dishonest or really want an A, but because they genuinely can’t see the gaps in their own thinking \u2014 the bits they glossed over, the assumptions they didn’t notice they were making, the leaps that felt obvious to them and won’t to anyone else.<\/p>\n

Whereas if you asked a professor to grade it, they’d catch all of those things on the first read because they’re coming at the work cold, with their own set of assumptions and their own sense of what “good” looks like. They notice the gaps the student walked right past. That’s the entire value of a second pair of eyes, and it’s exactly why I’ve been using Claude Code and Codex to review each other’s work.<\/p>\n

When Claude Code finishes an implementation, I hand the diff to Codex and ask it to tear it apart. When Codex ships something, Claude Code does the same. If I ask Claude Code or Codex to review its own work, I get a version of the same problem the student-grading-themselves had. The model agrees with its earlier choices. It defends the decisions it just made. It misses the things it was always going to miss.<\/p>\n

Stop pitting them, start pairing them<\/p>\n

I’ve spent a good amount of time pitting Claude Code and Codex against each other and trying to figure out which is better, but after experiencing what they can accomplish when used together, I’m not interested in that question anymore!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When you see Claude Code and Codex in the same sentence, there’s a good chance the article you’re…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":489840,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[18,19,17,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-489839","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-technology"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116592587501010098","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489839\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/489840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}