> but it (like Gemini CLI) still feels to me rather thrown together - a Claude Clone with a lot of rough edges.
I think this is because they see it as a checkbox whereas Anthropic sees it as a primary feature. OpenAI and Google just have to invest enough to kill Anthropic off and then decide what their own vision of coding agents looks like.
You can run the Claude code router and choose the model you want (including based on dynamic conditions)
Thick or thin, the wrapper so that users aren't manually copy and pasting code around is material to it being used and useful. Plus the systems prompt is custom to each tool and greatly affect how well the tool works.
You can actually use Codex right from Claude Code as an MCP without that proxy stuff and it works really well, especially for review or solving things Claude couldn't. Best of both worlds!
But these CLI tools are still fairly thin wrappers around an LLM. Remember: they're "just an LLM in a while loop with access to tool calls." (I exaggerate, and I love Claude Code's more advanced features like "skills" as much as anyone, but at the core, that's what they are.) The real issue at stake is what is the better LLM behind the agent: is GPT-5 or Sonnet 4.5 better at coding. On that I think opinion is split.
Incidentally, you can run Claude Code with GPT-5 if you want a fair(er) comparison. You need a proxy like LiteLLM and you will have to use the OpenAI api and pay per-token, but it's not hard to do and quite interesting. I haven't used it enough to make a good comparison, however.