I think they're all fine. Cursor is popular and charges a flat fee for model calls (interposed through their model call router, however that works). Aider is probably the most popular open source command line one. Claude Code is probably the most popular command line agent overall; Codex is the OpenAI equivalent (I like Codex fine).

later

Oh, I like Zed a lot too. People complain that Zed's agent (the back-and-forth with the model) is noticeably slower than the other agents, but to me, it doesn't matter: all the agents are slow enough that I can't sit there and wait for them to finish, and Zed has nice desktop notifications for when the agent finishes.

Plus you get a pretty nice editor --- I still write exclusively in Emacs, but I think of Zed as being a particularly nice code UI for an LLM agent.

I've settled on Cline for now, with openrouter as the backend for LLMs, Gemini 2.5 for planning and Claude 3.7 for act mode.

Cursor is fine, Claude Code and Aider are a bit too janky for me - and tend to go overboard (making full-ass git commits without prompting) and I can't be arsed to rein them in.

I use Augment Code as a plugin in IntelliJ and PyCharm. It's quite good, but I only use it for narrow, targeted objectives, agent mode or not.

I haven't seen any mentions of Augment code yet in comment threads on HN. Does anyone else use Augment Code?

Try https://aider.chat + OpenRouter.ai, pay-as-you-go, use any model you want, I use Claude Sonnet.

It has a very good system prompt so the code is pretty good without a lot of fluff.

I've been having okayish results with Zed + Claude 3.7

Speaking up for Devin.ai here. What I like about it is that after the initial prompt nearly all of my interaction with it is via pull request comments.

I have this workflow where I trigger a bunch of prompts in the morning, lunch and at the end of the day. At those same times I give it feedback. The async nature really means I can have it work on things I can’t be bothered with myself.

I need to know more about the morning/lunch/evening prompts, and I need to know right now. What are they? This sounds amazing.

Oh they aren’t like time based instructions or anything. First thing I do when I sit down in the morning is go through the list of tasks I thought up overnight and fire devin at them. Then I go do whatever “real” work I needed to get done. Then at lunch I check in to see how things are going and give feedback or new tasks. Same as the last thing I do at night.

It keeps _me_ from context switching into agent manager mode. I do the same thing for doing code reviews for human teammates as well.

Right, no, I figured that! Like the idea of preloading a bunch of things into a model that I don't have the bandwidth to sort through, but having them on tap when I come up for air from whatever I'm currently working on, sounds like a super good trick.

That’s kind of where Devin excels. The agent itself is good enough, I don’t even know what model it uses. But it’s hosted and well integrated with GitHub, so you just give it a prompt and out shoots a pr sometime later. You comment on the pr and it refines it. It has a concept of “sessions” so you can start many of those tasks at once. You can login to each of its tasks and see what it is doing or interdict, but I rarely do.

Like most of the code agents it works best with tight testable loops. But it has a concept of short vs long tests and will give you plans as nd confidence values to help you refine your prompt if you want.

I tend to just let it go. If it gets to a 75% done spot that isn’t worth more back and forth I grab the pr and finish it off.