Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working with coding agents for my development workflows, mainly Kilo Code and Codex. I came into Codex after spending significant time with Kilo, so the contrast was immediately noticeable.
Kilo felt smooth out of the box. Codex felt more erratic. My first instinct was to judge the agents.
Looking closer, the difference wasn’t model capability. It was defaults.
Kilo ships Distinct modes for different tasks (ask, architect, debug, code) -Strong context and task scaffolding by default -Built-in agent tools like a browser
Codex, by contrast: -Offers fewer explicit modes -Tends to one-shot tasks unless guided -Assumes you supply most of the structure
I originally tried Codex to reduce cost, since it comes bundled with a Plus plan compared to Kilo’s per-token pricing. But the experiment surfaced a more important realization:
Most “agent performance” differences I’ve seen come down to context and workflow design, not model intelligence.
That shifted my focus from “which agent is better” to “how do I design agent-independent workflows that provide the right structure by default”.
Current takeaway: context engineering matters more than model choice.
Sharing notes as I keep refining this.