For a long time my AI coding workflow was a junk drawer. Aider, Continue, OpenClaw, three different VS Code plugins, an .envrc with API keys for providers I'd forgotten I had. Then on April 4, 2026, Anthropic banned third-party agents from Claude Pro and Max subscriptions , and half my drawer stopped opening.

That was the part where I should have panicked. Instead I did the boring thing: I deleted everything except Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex. The two official agents. Both backed by the labs that train the models. Both at the same $100/month sweet spot now that OpenAI explicitly priced ChatGPT Pro against Claude Max .

I expected to pick a winner inside a week.…