> It’s striking the extent to which Claude Code and Codex are proving to be quite sticky; whichever harness you start working with is likely to be the one you stick with, and that figures to be even more the case with non-technical users.

My experience has been quite the opposite. I was using Claude Code almost exclusively this winter/spring and swapped to Codex earlier this summer. It took no time whatsoever to switch. And before Claude Code, I was using Cursor. Same story.

[edit: Oh and there was also a brief interlude with Conductor, though I think they're more or less just serving the underlying Claude/Codex harness]

For personal use I agree.

For companies, these decisions are very sticky. Companies go through a lot of red tape to get anything purchased and approved, then they discourage change because it's a lot of work.

So the product that gets a foothold in a company sticks for a long time.

Then a couple years later a sales person convinces an exec that they can save some money by switching, so the switching game begins. Not necessarily motivated by the better product, mostly the price. My wife's company keeps switching their tools out from under everyone every year or two. Just when they get everything stabilized and everyone familiar with the new tool, some new contract is signed that moves them all to some other company's suite.

agreed, my F500 company switched off claude code to copilot in 30 days. All 5k+ engineers. That is the fastest migration i've ever witnessed. This includes switching all our agents from Claude SDK to Copilot SDK.

Have you ever worked with a non-programmer and helped them setup their AI workflows?

You install MCP connectors, specific skills, work around model/harness quirks, set security boundaries etc.

It's a lot of work, and most people will never want to change it once they have it working.

I use a mixture of claude code and codex and kiro as my swarm.

They communicate through my own harness, and it's working pretty well so far. claude code is being overtaken by codex however because I noticed lately the accuracy of the latter is the best.

As a Hacker News user and commenter, you are not the type of user he’s referring to.

Same here. I flip flop between them. Most people I know who have access to both, technical or not, are doing the same. They’re just too close and sometimes one does what you want better than the other.

I think they stickiness is less about the difficulty of switching and more about the lack of desire. I’ve been using Claude since day one, it works well and I’m happy, I like it. I’m sure Codex is good too. Switching from one to the other certainly isn’t going to be a game changer, the discourse shows me the differences are marginal.

Probably the only reasons I would seek change are economical.

My same progression here. I started with ChatGPT website, then Anthropic website, then Cursor, then Windsurf!, then claude, then opencode, then ohmypi, then codex, finally back on Cursor now because I think they cracked the UX for what great dev looks like. The grok 4.5 fast model + cursor ergonomics is insanely good!

The cost of me moving around these different AI models and harnesses was pretty much 0.

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