Your Coding Agent's Best Feature Isn't the Code

About a year ago I wrote a piece on AI coding assistants - what was winning the race, where things were heading, what to spend your money on. A year on, that warrants a status update. I'll keep it tight.

Terminal coding agents won the race ages ago. That question is settled. The IDE-embedded approach had its moment but the terminal-first agents run circles around them now. And at the top, it is basically a two-horse race: Claude Code and Codex. Everything else is doing its best to close the gap, and fair play to them, some are getting genuinely good - Copilot, opencode, ampcode, Factory, Warp, Qwen Code, Kiro are all pushing hard and I would not bet against any of them in 12 months. And then there's Gemini CLI, which seems a bit... lost. Like it showed up to the party in last season's outfit and hasn't quite clocked that everyone's moved on. But right now, the two I reach for are Claude Code and Codex.

Here's the thing though.…