Codex with gpt-5-codex (high) is like an outsourced consultant. You give them the specs and a while later you get the output. It doesn't communicate much during the run (especially the VSCode plugin is really quiet).

Then you check the result and see what happened. It's pretty good at one-shotting things if it gets the gist, but if it goes off the rails you can't go back three steps and redirect.

On the other hand Claude Code is more like pair programming, it's chatting about while doing things, telling you what it's doing and why "out loud". It's easier to interrupt it when you see it going off track, it'll just stop and ask for more instructions (unlike Copilot where if you don't want it to rm the database.file you need to be really fast and skip the operation AND hit the stop button below the chatbox).

I use both regularly, GPT is when I know what to do and have it typed out. Claude is for experimenting and dialogue like "what would be a good idea here?" type of stuff.