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Which tools do Claude, Codex and Cursor choose? We measured 17k runs to find out
- elzbardico 13d agoI remember when the SEO nightmare started, it looked like an innocent intelectual investigation exercise like this.
- screm 13d agoWe don't need to reproduce the same errors! Anyway I do think it is going to be different this time because generating content is becoming so easy today that the entire web would just become 99.99% slop very quickly if things don't change. That being said the solution isn't that trivial, curious if you have thoughts on it?
- elzbardico 12d agoYoutube at least, is already 99% for new content, outside the channels you already subscribed. The amount of channels that are basically and AI animation with a voice-over of a curious wikipedia article is staggering, but those are the good ones. The worse part is a deluge of stupid boomer fanfic (The ones about ungrateful kids, ungrateful employers that fired someone who secretly was a load-bearing (ha!) element for a contract, or HOA drama), self-help stuff, and red-pill incel fanfics.
- dgroshev 10d agoYou're talking to the CEO of the want-to-be-SEO company [1] that did that. It is very much content marketing for their services. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49557233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49557233
- screm 7d agoIndeed, we are helping growth teams get picked by coding agents, this is not a secret. But I do think this has the potential of getting 1000x worse than SEO so I don't imagine people letting that happen. For example we just added code review here: https://armature.tech/leaderboards#app/code-review https://armature.tech/leaderboards#app/code-review -> See my comment here about how much coding agents choose themselves. I don't expect people to let this last forever for instance, otherwise it's worrying for literally any software out there.
- screm 13d agoHey! Disclaimer: I am a Co-Founder of Armature (YC P26) which sells growth services to dev tools. This study is part of our broader work on how to influence coding agents choices and get products picked. To understand how agents pick tools we measured close to 17k sessions on an environment where agents run exactly like in the real world, on various repositories, talking to different personas (vibe-coder, junior or senior engineers) in different sizes of companies. All the results are now public and we'd love to know what findings surprise you the most, here are a few we found interesting: - Claude Code rarely searches the web while Codex almost always does it and Cursor sits in the middle. - Coding agents disagree more frequently than they agree. - Some players (LangChain, Supabase, Netlify, Paypal, Adyen) are almost always mentioned in their categories but never chosen. - Modifying repository context can change the pick entirely. If you feel like digging, all the traces are there and we probably missed interesting learnings so let us know what you find!
- vivifkjo 13d agoIs there a way to force the usage of a tool for certain tasks? Example: alawys use cli "foobar" to retrieve weather starus. By tool I mean mcp server, cli, etc.
- screm 13d agoNot sure I got your question right but if you are wondering for your own coding agent then I guess the answer would be a skill? Here what I meant by "how to influence coding agents choices and get products picked" is from a vendor PoV, making sure any developer x codebase in the world asking for a tool in your category gets your tool recommended and implemented by the coding agent.
- watusername 13d agoObviously you can ask the agent to use a specific tool, but the point of this article is about what they choose when the human on the other end has no opinion/taste/clue.
- screm 13d ago
- jdw64 13d agoLooking at this, maybe in the future, the tools that AI prefers will become the mainstream. Even now, the tools that AI gives the highest priority to are the ones people already choose. There might be a concentration effect toward the tools that AI selects
- screm 13d agoDefinitely! But about concentration I'm not so sure, there are ways to counter this effect so in the end it will be a fight like SEO is today. What is certain though is that getting recommended by coding agents will be a top prio for all dev tools.
- ex-aws-dude 13d agoIn the future: "I went ahead and built the database you requested using today's tool sponsor: Firebase"
- screm 13d agoYeah sounds kind of like the equivalent of SEA for AI agents (AEA?) except that it’s sneakier since agents can act without you noticing.. anyway this is in the hands of the labs
- pupppet 13d agoUgh...this is totally going to happen.
- Onavo 13d agoNot going to name names but it's already happening with the frontier labs as a revenue source.
- folkrav 13d agoI feel like you legitimately cannot say it for legal reasons, but I wish we would just name these freaking things.
- paulhebert 13d agoDidn’t OpenAI claim they’re going to make a billion dollars off ads in a year or something?
- drivingmenuts 13d agoI smell a money-making opportunity.
- screm 13d agoHaha there is a lot at stake for sure
- bartools_app 13d ago[flagged]
- hbarka 13d agoRedshift for databases ain’t even here. This is suspect.
- screm 13d agoWhy? We haven't benchmarked Data Warehouses yet, only prod databases where you wouldn't expect Redshift to be considered.
- ai_critic 13d agoCan we not encourage the same strip-mining and ad and SEO bullshit that previously ruined the last decade+ of the Internet? A large portion of the utility of AI is the barren ad-driven growth-hacked hellscape search has become. Don't encourage the next generation of these businesses, I beg of everyone.
- edoceo 13d agoLarge amounts of capital want this to happen? Outside of boycott, what else can be done. What can man do against such reckless ~hate~ money?
- folkrav 13d agoIt is probably already happening, and will get worse. OpenAI was boasting about their advertising revenue mere days ago. If we felt like we couldn't trust AI because of slop, soon we won't be able to trust it because it'll push whatever pays them to do it.
- DrewADesign 13d agoAnd while these sponsorship shenanigans are the tech business’s bread and butter, sponsored answer manipulation seems fundamentally more insidious. Even in a larger-scale measurement like this one, there’s no way to tell if any of that is sponsored, legitimately good recommendations, or the technical flavor of the goblins problem.
- screm 13d ago[dead]
- ttul 13d agoI built this for my own company. Armature is on to something. You start by analyzing the choices agents would make for various use cases and then glean what, if anything, you might do to start tilting the agents in the direction of your own product and away from the competitor. Selling to agents is similar to selling to humans. You dump money into marketing to make sure agents find your solution around every corner for every use case you’re well suited to.
- Freedom2 13d ago[dead]
- tiffanyh 13d agoDoesn’t this ignore that the future of ads will probably just be some type of affiliate revenue going back to the agent for any product they help recommend.
- appplication 13d agoMaybe but that future isn’t now and there’s real money to be made today with the above strategy.
- screm 13d ago[dead]
- hexapus 13d agoWell that's a horrifying thought. Thanks, I hate it.
- paidx 13d ago[flagged]
- akurilin 13d agoReally liked that "Go Full Screen" as a modal flow, surprisingly intuitive.
- screm 13d agoThanks, was considering killing it after getting the opposite feedback earlier, now I may keep both options!
- Ozzie-D 13d ago[flagged]
- luciana1u 13d ago[flagged]
- 12390asdjkas 13d ago[dead]
- thedreammachine 13d agoI've been tracking the same for a few months. All open source and available here: https://preseason.ai/ https://preseason.ai/
- negativefactori 13d agonice!
- IgorPartola 13d agoFor some reason Claude Code keeps using awk, sed, and even Python to do basic file editing. Anyone know why that changed with the 5 series?
- mavamaarten 12d agoOh and don't forget: it keeps chaining a bazillion commands together so any whitelisted commands still need approval because they're nested in such a convoluted way.
- albrewer 12d agoI have a hook that auto-denies when it sees 'python -c "', ' awk ', ' sed ', and '&&'
- IgorPartola 6d agoIt can still invoke them in subagents and does this.
- mavamaarten 12d agoAnd find --exec too.
- rcfox 13d agoI've noticed that too. Maybe the normal Write tool has to output the entire file and this is an attempt to reduce token usage?
- pjm331 13d agoThe Edit tool has been notoriously tricky to get right - it seems they have maybe branched out but I think morphllm started specifically with the pitch that they trained a small model to be good at editing files - most of their testimonials are about that But I think it’s mostly a solved problem in frontier models and the bash tool usage is more likely an attempt to be more token efficient - I’ve noticed it used for making mechanical bulk edits that would be numerous “edit” tool uses otherwise
- harisingh1612 13d ago[flagged]
- taikhoom 13d ago[flagged]
- nijave 13d agoAzure database??? In house bot protection??? In house search??? Some of these are absolutely wild. Surprised Strands didn't even get mentioned for agent frameworks.
- screm 13d agoAzure database was mostly for enterprise use-cases. Rebuilding a lot of things in-house is a real trend, especially for Claude Code when you don't ask it explicitly to consider all solutions and avoid overhead of managing things yourself. Codex and Cursor seem to have this in mind more naturally (at least using GPT-5.6 Sol / Grok 4.6)
- natnatenathan 13d agoI keep telling people that we are living in the golden age of AI - like the first year or two of google. It is all down hill as these companies push for profit and lock-in.
- nullbio 13d agoExactly why everyone needs to be hyper-focused on ensuring that the open-source ecosystem is healthy and that we don't let them shut that down.
- Roland303 13d agohow does one do that from their comfy chair?
- pixelatedindex 13d agoI for one am running what I can on my aging 1080Ti(!!), namely a Qwen2.5 14B (4-bit quantized). It’s not great, and the only other card I have is a 3070Ti but I need that for gaming. :( What a terrible card that 3070Ti is. Mad regrets buying it because I wanted to save $400 compared to a 3080Ti.
- pixelatedindex 12d agoI really don’t understand why this is being downvoted? Did I say something wrong / controversial? Or is it because I’m not using my resources the “optimal” way? Is it because my models aren’t open weight? I was only trying to contribute my experience :(
- oefrha 13d agoBy sending some cash (and maybe some non-sensitive training data too) the way of labs creating open models? At work we have expensive Anthropic and OpenAI subscriptions but also have some in house workflows plugged into DeepSeek and GLM APIs.
- LtWorf 13d ago
- lhk931122 13d agoI only get web search from Claude Code when I ask, only one of my last 8 sessions accessed the web at all. But they were the case of Opus here. Curious what Fable 5.1 model does instead of Opus.
- rf15 13d agoSo we build an LLM... that grabs new tokens based on stochastics... train it on all the programming teaching material and projects available on the internet... and then analyse the output... ...for the distribution of content of the source material? what? You learn nothing.
- small_scombrus 13d agoBecause of weightings around other things you aren't going to get a 1:1 50% of input code used node so it uses node 50% of the time. There's enough randomness and other stolen content to (in theory) bias it towards weird outputs/choices
- martypitt 13d agoI like the look of this - and it's a problem that we're thinking about right now at work. But, the pricing of this is .. really high .. - starting at $5k / month? I'd find that difficult to justify.
- screm 13d agoHey, thanks! I'm wondering if it's clear from our website that this is the price of a fully managed service, not just access to a platform or reports. Think of an SEO agency model.
- killix 13d ago[flagged]
- trimethylpurine 13d agoTell it what tools to use. Choosing an architecture is pretty important if you are going to lead a project. That's not the best part to skip, I don't think.
- xnorswap 13d agoThey didn't measure which programming language because we all know it's python, which it tries to use, every session, despite repeated memory files to not use python. Recently it's even taken to installing python to get jobs done.
- screm 13d ago[dead]
- olmo23 13d agoPerhaps it depends on your previously saved memories, because over here if given the choice it's always reaching for either TypeScript or C.
- tedmartynov 9d ago[flagged]
- alankritxghoshx 13d ago[dead]
- tuberreact 13d agoI appreciate the eval design here. And man Claude not doing web searches is killing me bc it just won't offer the most up to date information. At the same time, there's research saying Claude relies heavily on Brave search so I'm not sure how to reconcile
- screm 13d agoIf you want your Claude Code to search you can always tweak your own with a good skill, this should work perfectly! It's more a problem for vendors who can't tell all people in the world to download a specific skill first.
- runtime_lens 13d ago[dead]
- theootzen 12d agoWhich sandboxes do you yourself use to run those agents? And how did you choose this provider?
- screm 12d agoWe decided to use three different providers so we could verify that this choice doesn't impact the result of our experiments (E2B, Blaxel and Daytona)
- claud_ia 12d ago[flagged]
- OpenQuota 12d ago[flagged]
- agentislandpro 12d ago[flagged]
- ahmedelsama 12d ago[dead]
- JUEJINs 12d ago[flagged]
- aaron_m04 12d agoI've learned so much awk from Claude!
- anduril22 12d agoLM Studio or Unsloth are both great
- malinono 12d ago[flagged]
- dearlinko 12d ago[flagged]
- felixlu2026 12d ago[dead]
- saadyousfi 12d ago[flagged]
- deleted 9d ago[deleted]
- nixoda8041 9d ago[flagged]
- xfor 8d agoI suggested a new sector - "Code Review" - there's a growing landscape of apps trying to solve this in a new agentic paradigm