Fair I agree that was true of early codex and my perception too.. but today there are two announcements that came out and thats what im referring to.

specifically, the GPT-5.3 post explicitly leans into "interactive collaborator" langauge and steering mid execution

OpenAI post: "Much like a colleague, you can steer and interact with GPT-5.3-Codex while it’s working, without losing context."

OpenAI post: "Instead of waiting for a final output, you can interact in real time—ask questions, discuss approaches, and steer toward the solution"

Claude post: "Claude Opus 4.6 is designed for longer-running, agentic work — planning complex tasks more carefully and executing them with less back-and-forth from the user."