English

Cross-Model LLM Code Review: Should you use Claude to review Codex or vice versa?

Software Engineering 2026-07-22 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Developers increasingly use two coding agents together: one writes a draft, and the other reviews it. However, it is not clear whether the pairing is worth its cost and time, or whether the order of the pairing matters. We run a controlled experiment on 116 recent hard and medium lcb tasks with Claude and Codex across six conditions to approximate a software practitioner's workflow: both solo baselines, both cross-model orderings, and both same-model orderings. The reviewer sees the problem and the writer's draft but cannot execute tests, which approximates a code review step. Claude review raises Codex drafts from 71.6% to 89.7% (pBH=.001p_{BH}=.001); Codex self review raises them to 84.5% (pBH=.022p_{BH}=.022). The reverse direction does not pay off: Codex reviewing Claude drafts drops the pass rate from 91.4% to 82.8% (pBH=.046p_{BH}=.046), and Claude self review leaves the 91.4% baseline unchanged. Our evaluation indicates that the useful pairing is asymmetric: use Claude to review Codex, not the other way around.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.21656,
  title  = {Cross-Model LLM Code Review: Should you use Claude to review Codex or vice versa?},
  author = {Zuodong Xiang and Yike Zhang and YueMing Zhang and Hailu Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.21656},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

This paper had been accepted by Agentic SE @ KDD'26