alt Hacker NewsHey!
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!
Replies
> Claude Code rarely searches the web while Codex almost always does
I’m trying to understand why they are opposite. I think it is true, I find myself giving a secondary prompt to Claude to “research this” and only then will it fetch. Codex is bang on fetching already.
Is 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.
Hi. I appreciate that you need to make rent, but if your business is basically "we do growth hacking and SEO tricks on models and get them to use products that aren't actually best for the job", you are scum.
You are perpetuating shitty practices that have hurt developers for years now. Part of the reason people use AI is because of how useless search is due to the previous generation doing the same kind of thing you propose.
Please do something else with your life.
The data was cool. Then I tried to tap on one of the other tabs. “This content is easier to read while full screen!” - Ok I’m game. “Hey this is what makes armature special!” - I don’t care, I’m here to look at data, not onboard onto some random platform. It took ages to find the tiny “skip tour” button, hiding in black on black text. Then it gave me another popup, which I dismissed without reading. Then the full screen modal was visible but it was horizontally misaligned - the left edge was cut off and the right of my phone screen was all white. I closed the tab with great prejudice. (Safari on iOS if you wanna try reproducing it)
I’m sure you - or Claude - built something you’re proud of. But I left your website frustrated.