Coding Agents

Coding agents span in-editor pair programmers that autocomplete and refactor, terminal agents that run commands and edit files, and autonomous engineers that take a ticket and open a pull request. Pick based on where it runs — your IDE, the command line, or the cloud — how much autonomy you want it to have, and how cleanly it fits your existing codebase, tests, and review process. The most important axis is the trust boundary: an in-editor assistant keeps a human on every keystroke, while an autonomous agent needs sandboxing, guardrails, and a disciplined diff-review habit before you let it touch a real repository. Evaluate language and framework coverage on your actual stack, how well it pulls context from the wider codebase, and whether it can run your tests and iterate on failures rather than guessing once.

Pricing is usually a per-seat subscription, sometimes with usage-based limits on the underlying model; a few capable options are open source and self-hostable if you want to bring your own keys and keep code in-house. Public benchmarks are a weak proxy here — the real test is a week on your own code, watching how often you accept output unedited and how much review overhead it adds. A tool that writes plausible code you can't trust is slower than no tool at all.