I spent last month building real projects with both tools—a Rust-based file watcher on Codex CLI and a SaaS dashboard on Bolt.new. Here's what I actually found, not the marketing fluff.
The Two Tools at a Glance
Codex CLI is OpenAI's terminal-native coding agent. It lives in your terminal, reads and writes files directly to your local filesystem, and uses GPT-4.5-turbo with an agentic loop that can fix its own compilation errors.