I've spent the past 4+ months building an internal multi-agent orchestrator for coding teams. Agents communicate through a coordination protocol we built, and all inter-agent messages plus runtime metrics are logged to a database.

Our default topology is a two-agent pair: one implementer and one reviewer. In practice, that usually means Opus writing code and Codex reviewing it.

I just finished a 10-hour run with 5 of these teams in parallel, plus a Codex run manager. Total swarm: 5 Opus 4.7 agents and 6 Codex/GPT-5.4 agents.

Opus was launched with:

`export CLAUDE_AUTOCOMPACT_PCT_OVERRIDE=35 claude --dangerously-skip-permissions --model 'claude-opus-4-7[1M]' --effort high --thinking-display summarized`

Codex was launched with:

`codex --dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox --profile gpt-5-4-high`

What surprised me was usage: after 10 hours, both my Claude Code account and my Codex account had consumed 28% of their weekly capacity from that single run.

I expected Claude Code usage to be much higher. Instead, on these settings and for this workload, both platforms burned the same share of weekly budget.

So from this datapoint alone, I do not see an obvious usage-efficiency advantage in switching from Opus 4.7 to Codex/GPT-5.4.