75% of developers I surveyed prefer Claude Code

Earlier this week , I explored the differences (or, really, amazing similarities) between agentic coding AIs, ChatGPT Codex and Claude Code . I explained how I use both tools and provided some suggestions for exploring them.

Also: Claude Code vs. Codex: Why I use both and how to choose one (if you must)

But I'm just one guy. In this article, we'll broaden our selection to more than 100 developers who actively use AI coding tools.

To be clear, this isn't a fully scientific survey. I posted a call for developer opinions to  HARO  and Qwoted, two services that specialize in connecting experts who want to be quoted or interviewed with journalists and analysts who might choose to quote or interview them.

Also: Claude's Record-a-Skill cut my research from hours to 30 minutes - but the magic has limits

Still, 138 people responded to my question, "Do you use Claude Code or OpenAI Codex? If so, which did you choose, and why?" By the way, if you want to know how I aggregated all these responses, here's the story about the Claude skill I used to do the job.

The top-line data point is interesting. Three out of four developers use Claude Code. This mirrors my discussions with developer colleagues. Very few of them talk about Codex, and all of them talk about Claude Code.

A little more than a third of the respondents use Codex. And, explaining why the numbers don't fully add up, 22% use both Claude Code and Codex (I'm in that cohort).

Naman Ahuja is a software engineer at Meta. He said, "I use Claude Code extensively at Meta because it fits naturally into my development workflow. I treat it like a peer: brainstorming ideas, shaping plans, and executing. It has improved my productivity and lets me focus on more business problems to solve. I'm happy with it, though I review its output carefully."

Another Claude Code user is Mona Rajhans , a senior software engineering manager at Palo Alto Networks. She said, "I use Claude Code daily and manage a team of engineers who do too. What I notice at both levels: it handles context across large, complex codebases better than anything else we've tried. Code quality has held up. Adoption was faster than any tool rollout I've managed in years."

Saurabh Kumar Suresh Jain is a staff data scientist at Nvidia. He said he prefers Claude Code: "I use it daily on a Python analytics dashboard that pulls EDA farm telemetry -- multi-file refactors, writing tests, reviewing my own merge requests before I push. What sold me is that it reads the whole repo before it edits, instead of guessing. Yes, happy with it."

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Srinivas Chippagiri is a senior member of technical staff at Tableau, a Salesforce company. He said, "I use Claude Code for cloud-native distributed systems and AI infrastructure work: service code, pipelines, and the glue around ML workloads. I chose it for agentic, multi-file reasoning. It navigates a large codebase, runs commands, and iterates toward a working result rather than just autocompleting a line. I'm happy with it. It removes real toil on the routine parts, but the architecture and the final judgment stay mine, and I review everything it touches."

There are some definite preference trends. When it comes to why developers prefer Claude Code over Codex, these were the main themes:

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Obviously, these are developers' opinions and reflect their perceptions of the products. We also had single-user responses that shed some light on preferences. These included:

Interestingly, I didn't get responses from developers who prefer Codex at institutional heavy hitters like Nvidia, Meta, Palo Alto Networks, and Salesforce. That result doesn't mean big enterprises don't choose Codex. It just means that my informal survey didn't generate those responses.

Also: 'Specialists aren't required' anymore: How to stay valuable in an AI agent workplace today

Chris Seymour , founder of GS Consulting, said he prefers Codex: "I prefer OpenAI Codex and use it for secure AI and cybersecurity software, testing, research automation, and deployments. I've been happy with it, particularly when the work crosses code and infrastructure. I also greatly prefer it over Claude as OpenAI provides much more usage for the same price. I never run out of tokens, and I'm using it every day."

Anthony Woo is CFO and co-founder at Torus, a nonprofit providing curbside composting. He said, "I used both Claude Code and OpenAI Codex to rebuild Torus's website. Claude Code was stronger at understanding the broader codebase, but Codex delivered more precise, reliable edits with less cleanup. I favor Codex and am very satisfied with how much it accelerated development."

Adam Dalloul is a computer science student and the founder of EmpirioLabs AI, which is part of the Nvidia Inception program . His perspective is interesting because he hosts 100-plus AI models on one API, and he suggested the harness, not the model, is what he's choosing. He said, "I use both Claude Code and Codex apps, not CLI, as daily drivers, each with their own model. My assessment is that as a harness, Codex is far better. The app is much more stable, clearer, and has better QoL features, context management, and compacting."

Looking at responses overall, there are some definite themes for why some developers prefer Codex:

Some of the individual comments included:

One in five developers said they used both Claude Code and Codex. In my comparison article , I explained that I use each tool on its own project.

Also: How I stopped a massive WordPress spam attack with 4,700 lines of code in two days - thanks to Codex and Claude

However, I recently completed an emergency mitigation project, and I used both tools together. I was very impressed with how successful that deeply urgent weekend push turned out to be. Other developers share my opinion.

Michael Rang...

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