Basically never hear about Augment Code, Gemini CLI, Codex CLI, etc. which all seem pretty well respected. Or Replit, Bolt which seem to have huge user numbers (not professional devs though which is why I assume they're so under-represented here).
Basically never hear about Augment Code, Gemini CLI, Codex CLI, etc. which all seem pretty well respected. Or Replit, Bolt which seem to have huge user numbers (not professional devs though which is why I assume they're so under-represented here).
Because they are the most popular.
Then Replit, V0, Lovable are all extremely popular.
I don't have a horse in this race just find it interesting. Your Coke vs Pepsi analogy is a good one though.
As boring an answer as it may be, mindshare matters. Newcomers face outsized inertia in winning that mindshare over from the major incumbents.
Stars are only a proxy for use, of course, but I'm not sure what a closer public indicator might be.
1. https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli
From HN conversations I'd have said Claude Code was 90%+ of the market by what I remember seeing.
Claude Code wins for me for one simple reason: I can just pay for a MAX account and not worry about running out of credits or going through my credit card limit. That makes me use the tool twice as much as the others, where I’m constantly watching my credit balance.
Cursor wins because it was the first big one, not sure if it has any important advantages over claude code anymore.
One, it is very good except for its prise. Because of the cost, I tried Codex, but after a few simple questions I gave up. Nowhere close to CC when it comes to tool usage. Gemini cli asked for a Cloud project id, no idea what is meant with this. Cursor is not an option because I think long term they can’t compete with the integration that Anthropic can offer.
Second, CC offers capabilities you will learn as power user, in that sense it is like a game; addictive.
Here is a list of agents I've tried:
- Good: Gemini CLI, Opencode
- Okay: Jules (hampered by its limited sandboxed env)
- Bad: Junie (buggy), GitHub Copilot (dumb)
Here is a nice leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/galileo-ai/agent-leaderboard
I do wonder why never ever anybody else mentions Amp though. Am I their only user?! It explains why it works so fast ;)
However, Claude wastes less of my time than Gemini.
In my experience, Gemini is a lot more likely to have an empty tool call and get in a loop of using a tool that isn't working, or get confused and use some previous instruction from the context window instead of the task at hand and go on a totally crazy tangent. Claude is generally a lot more accurate.
Replit is a cash grab. It couldn't build a basic app with Three.js without stepping on itself.
Claude Code is the only AI tool that can grok my C++ codebase.
Cursor feels right so long as you have proper .md's
Waiting for access to Kiro to try it.
Currently running GGUF models on my own with an OpenAI mock server I wrote so Continue.dev works in VS Code as an agent. Meh. I don't want to spend a bunch of money for a project that I can't use in the end so I don't waste my money on tokens.
Claude Code grabbed tons of attention because it uses the command line and enables developers to boost their productivity. Because it works via the command line, it doesn’t require using an editor/IDE you may not use, and it’s extensible via custom slash commands and hooks.
It’s only been out a few months and there’s already a cottage industry of websites, tutorials and videos supporting it.
It’s not perfect but it’s really good in ways that matter to developers.
I’ve never seen so many developers making videos and blogposts describing how happy they are to pay $200/month for the Max plan due to the productivity gains.
maddmann•1d ago
V0 is talked about a bit more but they did a good job specializing it more on frontend (not trying to do everything)
Maybe that is why in circles dominated by people closer to the code, those tools aren’t discussed much.