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Comment by wxw | Hacker News Reader

> It’s striking the extent to which Claude Code and Codex are proving to be quite sticky; whichever harness you start working with is likely to be the one you stick with, and that figures to be even more the case with non-technical users.

My experience has been quite the opposite. I was using Claude Code almost exclusively this winter/spring and swapped to Codex earlier this summer. It took no time whatsoever to switch. And before Claude Code, I was using Cursor. Same story.

[edit: Oh and there was also a brief interlude with Conductor, though I think they're more or less just serving the underlying Claude/Codex harness]

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For personal use I agree.

For companies, these decisions are very sticky. Companies go through a lot of red tape to get anything purchased and approved, then they discourage change because it's a lot of work.

So the product that gets a foothold in a company sticks for a long time.

Then a couple years later a sales person convinces an exec that they can save some money by switching, so the switching game begins. Not necessarily motivated by the better product, mostly the price. My wife's company keeps switching their tools out from under everyone every year or two. Just when they get everything stabilized and everyone familiar with the new tool, some new contract is signed that moves them all to some other company's suite.

Every company that I've worked with that provided models internally did so through LiteLLM and offered both Anthropic and OpenAI models so it was trivial to switch between them.

Most companies just get you a Claude team sub and maybe a couple of skills.

We only get Copilot. I’m not very happy.

What do you find worse about it? I've been switching between it, Codex, and Claude Code to try to compare them, and my only conclusion so far has been that it's nice that Copilot has both OpenAI and Anthropic models as options.

The parent poster is almost certainly talking about inference within workflows and not for interactive coding agents.

I like all the different comments in this thread saying that most companies do X, where X is a different answer from each person: LiteLLM, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code.

Companies have learned their lessons on stickiness with cloud providers. Every enterprise has a multi-provider strategy now.

I imagine the play here is going be connectors. Can you get slack to avoid integrating with anyone other American ai providers, same with Google suite, etc etc.

It's almost trivial to create a custom Slack application wrapping your desired harness running in a container on your organization's k8s cluster. Likewise with MCP support. These are already open.

I'm confused, I work at a big giant Fortune 500, we all get GitHub Copilot subscriptionsn - we can switch between OpenAI and Anthropic models with just a click in Visual Studio. There's no stickiness at all. They just made us go through a training after the price hikes about how to choose between models for the best cost/benefit ratio.

The models are not what is being discussed here, it is the harnesses. That is, Claude Code, Codex, and what you use, GitHub Copilot. I suspect there would have to be strong reasons for your Fortune 500 company to switch away from Copilot.

Similarly, I have made no ground in arguing to try to get Codex at the company I work for, which got Claude Code a year ago and sees no reason to go through the whole process of setting up any alternatives when Claude Code already works and is at the frontier.

claude code is free to use, you can use claude code with any non-anthropic model, so harness stickiness doesn't benefit the AI labs at all.

Claude Code is closed source software that has had quite a few documented bugs with degradation when using non-Anthropic models, FWIW, I would not suggest using it.

Same here, except we just defaulted everyone to Auto and expect the percentage of tokens spent via the auto router to be high.

GitHub Copilot is the sticky product in your org.

You can choose a selection of different models within it, but you're not using Codex or Claude Code.

Not sure about Codex but Claude Code works with Github Copilot and can even work with open source models like Kimi/Deep Seek.

GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio are the sticky products for your company.

We too use GH Copilot in our enterprise. OpenCode works flawlessly with GH Copilot subscription if you don't prefer VS Code.

Same here. I flip flop between them. Most people I know who have access to both, technical or not, are doing the same. They’re just too close and sometimes one does what you want better than the other.

Have you ever worked with a non-programmer and helped them setup their AI workflows?

You install MCP connectors, specific skills, work around model/harness quirks, set security boundaries etc.

It's a lot of work, and most people will never want to change it once they have it working.

It strikes me as like setting up an IDE. People have preferences, switching is possible, but there are advantages to saying "we are a Visual Studio + Resharper shop" or "everyone uses IntelliJ to work on this project".

Skills are quite interoperable, and you can easily ask Codex / Claude to help you with switching the MCP connectors or any other things specific to your previous workflow. It's been quite low friction in my experience.

I know someone who runs AI training.

They will have people who don't understand the distinction between visiting Claude.ai and downloading Claude Cowork.

They type the words "setup MCP" into Claude.ai and expect it to automate Excel on their machine.

There's a pretty big gap between the things we talk about here, and where the world is at.

Yes. I taught the non-programmer to ask the harness to set up things like MCP connectors.

we have AI. WHAT is it good for if a harness cant just take a api endpoint and some permissions and duplicate.

its so distracting seeing these types of confision.

every plugin is already just multimodaling their targets.

I think they stickiness is less about the difficulty of switching and more about the lack of desire. I’ve been using Claude since day one, it works well and I’m happy, I like it. I’m sure Codex is good too. Switching from one to the other certainly isn’t going to be a game changer, the discourse shows me the differences are marginal.

Probably the only reasons I would seek change are economical.

Convergence in coding makes them highly substitutable. But I could see harnesses configured for different purposes -- let's say, a harness for creating teaching plans -- being able to cater to its audience better than a coding harness. Maybe it's got tools to plug into standardized curricula, what the lesson books will be, what other lesson plans the district's teachers have made, etc., which could be done in a clunky way in a regular harness but could be streamlined.

A sticky product is one that switching away from creates a major hassle. Which means the user will pay more to avoid said hassle.

“I don’t really have a strong preference between the two” is another way of saying “the product isn’t sticky”, which is another way of saying “this provider has very little room to increase margins”

No, I don’t think so, and searching seems to confirm my view. Inconvenience of switching is just one aspect.

There’s little difference between Coke and Pepsi and the barrier to switching is nil, yet clearly the products have stickiness. People have slight preferences and become familiar with the brand and then engagement becomes habitual.

The effects on margins are irrelevant to this.

agreed, my F500 company switched off claude code to copilot in 30 days. All 5k+ engineers. That is the fastest migration i've ever witnessed. This includes switching all our agents from Claude SDK to Copilot SDK.

My same progression here. I started with ChatGPT website, then Anthropic website, then Cursor, then Windsurf!, then claude, then opencode, then ohmypi, then codex, finally back on Cursor now because I think they cracked the UX for what great dev looks like. The grok 4.5 fast model + cursor ergonomics is insanely good!

The cost of me moving around these different AI models and harnesses was pretty much 0.

I use a mixture of claude code and codex and kiro as my swarm.

They communicate through my own harness, and it's working pretty well so far. claude code is being overtaken by codex however because I noticed lately the accuracy of the latter is the best.

As a Hacker News user and commenter, you are not the type of user he’s referring to.

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