For a while I felt slightly embarrassed about keeping two agentic coding tools open at once. Claude Code in one terminal, Codex in another. It looked like I couldn't commit to one. Then I noticed I was reaching for each of them at different moments, on purpose, and the embarrassment turned into a workflow.
The short version: one of them is for building and exploring, the other is for running the boring, repeatable work. This post is the division of labor I landed on, built around the routine automation that made it obvious, plus the cost logic underneath it. I build WordPress plugins, so my examples lean that way, but the split is general.
The split that took me a while to see
Some tasks are a conversation. You poke at the problem, change your mind, follow a thread, back up. Other tasks are a straight line. You know exactly what you want done, you just don't want to do it by hand for the fortieth time.
I use Claude Code for the first kind. It holds the whole project in its head and is comfortable going back and forth while a design takes shape. I use Codex, specifically its non-interactive mode, for the second kind: the straight-line, do-this-exact-thing work that I want to fire from a script.
