Codex shows you the plan. Claude Code makes you approve it.

Both flagship coding agents externalize a plan. The divergence is what the plan is for.

In Claude Code, the plan is a gate: research first, present the steps, wait. The human edits or accepts, and only then does execution start. The plan is a contract, and deviations from it surface as updates against something you agreed to.

In Codex cloud runs, the plan is a trace: a live step list that updates as the task proceeds. It's genuinely useful — you can see where the run is and what's left — but it authorizes nothing. Execution never waited for you.

Neither is wrong. Gates cost latency and attention; traces cost control. But they're different patterns wearing the same UI, and calling both "planning" hides the choice a designer actually has to make: does the step list block, or narrate?

This is the kind of divergence the side-by-side on the pattern page is built to hold — same anatomy part, structurally different mechanism.