By April 25, 2026, I had already decided to move my development work away from Claude Code and into Codex. That happened fast. I first tried Codex on April 22, then GPT-5.5 landed on April 23, and within two more days the difference in actual day-to-day use was obvious.
The short version: Claude Code was burning too much token budget for real development work. Codex was slower, but it gave me far more room to stay in flow and keep working. That trade was easy.
What Changed So Quickly
I did not switch because Codex felt flashier. I switched because Claude Code had become hard to rely on for sustained work. Sessions would burn fast, and once that happened, I was done for a while whether I still had momentum or not.
Codex felt different almost immediately. Responses took longer, and that was noticeable, but the extra completion time did not bother me. What mattered more was that I could keep going. For actual development work, that mattered more than speed.
GPT-5.5 arriving on April 23 pushed that feeling further. The model felt more usable right away, and it made Codex easier to take seriously as the main tool instead of a side experiment.
Why I Switched
A few things made the decision clear.
More usable limits. This was the main reason. Codex gave me more headroom for longer sessions, which meant I could keep shipping instead of constantly thinking about usage burn.
Good enough latency. Claude Code was faster. Codex was not. But the slower completion time was acceptable because I still got more useful work done across a full session.
Better task reliability for my workflow. On concrete coding tasks, Codex felt steadier for the way I work. I spent less time correcting drift and more time moving to the next task.
That combination mattered more to me than raw speed.
What I Was Actually Using It For
The first real use case was not writing a blog post or asking vague questions. It was development work. Portfolio changes, workflow setup, repo research, and the kind of terminal-first tasks that pile up when you are rebuilding how you work.
I also ended up wiring Codex and Claude into the same claude-mem flow for shared context across sessions. That part was interesting technically, but it was not the reason I switched. The reason was simpler: one tool was letting me work longer and more consistently than the other.
The Real Tradeoff
Claude Code felt faster. If I only judged it by completion speed, it would win.
But that was not the bottleneck. The real bottleneck was how quickly it burned through usage when I was trying to do serious development work. Codex gave me more room to stay productive, even if each response took a little longer.
That is the trade I care about right now. I do not need the fastest possible answer if the session ends before the work does.
Where I Landed
As of April 25, 2026, Codex became my main development tool. I stopped using Claude Code for actual software work because it was no longer practical for how I build.
I still use the free version of Claude sometimes, but not as my main coding workflow. For development, I switched to Codex and stayed there.