Claude Added Codex. And Codex Made Itself Better Than Claude.
Native version on surajmarkup.in with in-article visuals preserved.
I found Agent Orchestrator the day pkarnal open-sourced it. 30 agents building their own orchestration system — that was the first time I’d seen parallel agent management treated as a real engineering problem.
I cloned the repo. I use Codex. Codex was broken: wrong CLI flags, no tracking, no dashboard support, crash on launch. Claude Code had everything; Codex had a placeholder.
So my first contribution became: make Codex work. I ran three agents in parallel, and what happened surprised me.
The setup: three agents, one day
Three agents. Running in parallel. Claude studied itself, built support for its competitor, and then the competitor took over and went further.
What was broken
What Claude built for its competitor
Claude’s introspection agent studied its own plugin. The implementation agent translated each feature into Codex-compatible code.
Some highlights:
- Metadata hooks: wrapper scripts in front of
gitandghcapture metadata transparently. - Session tracking: streaming parser to handle very large Codex logs.
- Activity detection: inferred via file update cadence + process liveness.
Cursor Bugbot reviewed commits and surfaced shell injection, race conditions, and path traversal. Claude patched each one.
Then Codex made itself better than Claude
I handed the plugin to Codex: this is your integration. Review it. Make yourself more mature than Claude.
Before and after
What I took away
- AI agents can do competitive analysis on themselves.
- Hand code to the subject. Codex knows its own API and file quirks best.
- Three parallel agents > one sequential agent. A week compressed into a day.
The story in 6 steps
- Found Agent Orchestrator on launch day
- Tried Codex — broken
- First contribution: fix it
- Claude studied itself and built Codex support
- Codex reviewed itself and surpassed parity
- Full support + extras in one day
Claude made Codex mature. Codex made itself better than Claude. The orchestrator doesn’t pick sides anymore.
Repo: github.com/ComposioHQ/agent-orchestrator
My GitHub: github.com/suraj-markup