I build Friday, an open-source app that runs coding agents side by side. One thing it does is hand a task from one agent to another, for example when one hits its usage limit. I wanted to know if that actually helps, or if it just sounds nice. So I measured it.
Claude Code first found and explained a bug, and changed nothing. Then Codex fixed it three ways, each in its own fresh copy of the project, with one message from me:
I ran 14 tasks, 6 of them in Express. Everything was measured from the session log, not from what the tools say about themselves, and checked by running the project's own tests in the folder Codex worked in.
| Hand-off vs starting over | |
|---|---|
| Tokens | Fewer in 13 of 14 tasks, a median of 21% (about 49,000 per hand-off). In Express alone, fewer in 6 of 6. |
| Exploring before the first edit | A median of 2 steps against 4, fewer in 14 of 14 |
| Speed | First edit sooner in 12 of 14, finished sooner in 11 of 14, by a median of about 7 seconds |
| Fixed | 14 of 14 every way. In Express, all 1,288 of its tests passed after every fix. |
In Express alone the finish times were even, so I make no speed claim.
Pasting Claude Code's whole answer into Codex by hand did about as well: the same tokens, the same exploring, and in Express it finished faster. So I'm not claiming anything against a careful copy and paste.
What a hand-off gives you is that handover in one click, every time: what was asked, what was found, which files were read and what was run, without you being the clipboard.
I ran this on the hosted version of Friday on 13 and 14 October 2026, before the open-source app existed. The open-source app has hand-off too, but I haven't run this benchmark on it, so these numbers aren't a measurement of it.
Every run, the method and the raw data, including the runs I set aside, are on the benchmark page.
If you can find a flaw in how I measured, I'd like to hear it in the comments.
The open-source app is at [github.com/splashxmoon/friday](https://github.com/splashxmoon/friday): MIT, no account, on your own computer.