FEATUREDBest AI Coding Assistants: Complete Comparison
Every major tool now has an agent, a plan mode, and a config file. What still differs is where it runs and how it meters you. Pick on those two axes.
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Head-to-head write-ups where the comparison was run rather than summarised: Claude Code against Cursor, Codex CLI, Copilot CLI, Cline, Aider, RooCode and Antigravity, plus model-level bakeoffs across Claude, GPT and Gemini. Each one states what was measured — the bill for the same task, tokens consumed, wall-clock time, and which parts of a setup port between tools and which silently do not.
FEATUREDEvery major tool now has an agent, a plan mode, and a config file. What still differs is where it runs and how it meters you. Pick on those two axes.

AI coding assistants complete code inline; autonomous agents execute multi-turn tool loops across shells and compilers. Here is how their architectures and costs diverge.

Google sunset consumer Gemini CLI on June 18 in favor of Antigravity CLI. We audited breaking changes, command mappings, and config translation.

Four arms of one real task on one machine. Claude Code read four files with typed tools; ChatGPT's agent shelled out, failed its first command, and recovered.

Ten alternatives, nineteen teardowns, and not one of them ranks these tools by the code they write. That refusal is the finding, and here is what survives it.

windsurf.com now 308s to devin.ai/desktop, Cascade is retired, and claude import windsurf exits 1. The config surfaces are still worth comparing.

The same publish gate as a skill and as a subagent. The skill won on its name alone; the subagent lost with its description in full, and the work landed in the wrong context window.

The same rule written as a skill and as a PostToolUse hook, on identical prompts. The skill arm was indistinguishable from having no policy at all.