The power of tools like Claude Code comes from giving the AI access to fundamental command-line tools (e.g., `bash`, `grep`). This allows the AI to compose novel solutions and lets product teams define new features using simple English prompts rather than hard-coded logic.

Browser-based ChatGPT cannot execute code or connect to external APIs, limiting its power. The Codex CLI unlocks these agentic capabilities, allowing it to interact with local files, run scripts, and connect to databases, making it a far more powerful tool for real-world tasks.

Structure your development workflow to leverage the AI agent as a parallel processor. While you focus on a hands-on coding task in the main editor window, delegate a separate, non-blocking task (like scaffolding a new route) to the agent in a side panel, allowing it to "cook in the background."

LLMs often get stuck or pursue incorrect paths on complex tasks. "Plan mode" forces Claude Code to present its step-by-step checklist for your approval before it starts editing files. This allows you to correct its logic and assumptions upfront, ensuring the final output aligns with your intent and saving time.

Codex lacks a built-in feature for parallel sub-agents like Claude Code. The workaround is to instruct the main Codex instance to write a script that launches multiple, separate terminal sessions of itself. Each session handles a sub-task in parallel, and the main instance aggregates the results.

When a conversation with Codex approaches its context window limit, using `/new` erases all history. The `/compact` command is a better alternative. It instructs the LLM to summarize the current conversation into a shorter form, freeing up tokens while retaining essential context for continued work.

Codex lacks formal custom commands. You can achieve the same result by storing detailed prompts and templates in local files (e.g., meeting summaries, PRD structures). Reference these files with the '@' symbol in your prompts to apply consistent instructions and formatting to your tasks.

The agent development process can be significantly sped up by running multiple tasks concurrently. While one agent is engineering a prompt, other processes can be simultaneously scraping websites for a RAG database and conducting deep research on separate platforms. This parallel workflow is key to building complex systems quickly.

An emerging power-user pattern, especially among new grads, is to trust AI coding assistants like Codex with entire features, not just small snippets. This "full YOLO mode" approach, while sometimes failing, often "one-shots" complex tasks, forcing a recalibration of how developers should leverage AI for maximum effectiveness.