Most business owners I talk to judge an AI project by the demo. The agent answers a question. It drafts an email. It looks finished.

What rarely comes up is the quieter choice underneath: which coding agent is your developer working in while they build that for you?

Full disclosure: I built Agent Ready Rankings ( https://rankings.leffke.com ), a site that scores AI agent tools out of 10. I track six coding agents there. The scores below are overall scores from my Nov 5 data run — not a same-day refresh — and browsing the site is free. The full score breakdown is part of Pro, $10/month.

Why the coding agent matters to an owner

A coding agent is the AI-assisted editor or CLI your builder uses to write, change, and ship software. It is not the customer-facing agent you may be buying.…