For a long time my AI coding workflow was a junk drawer. Aider, Continue, OpenClaw, three different VS Code plugins, an .envrc with API keys for providers I'd forgotten I had. Then on April 4, 2026, Anthropic banned third-party agents from Claude Pro and Max subscriptions , and half my drawer stopped opening. That was the part where I should have panicked. Instead I did the boring thing: I deleted everything except Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex. The two official agents. Both backed by the labs that train the models. Both at the same $100/month sweet spot now that OpenAI explicitly priced ChatGPT Pro against Claude Max . I expected to pick a winner inside a week. A month later I'm still running both, and that turns out to be the actual answer. Two tools, two completely different ideas It's tempting to call Claude Code and Codex "competitors." They are, in the same sense that a chef's knife and a slow cooker compete: they both produce dinner, but if you compare them on a spec sheet you'll miss the point.…