By no means are better background agents "mythical" as you claim. I didn't bother to mention them as it is easy enough to search for asynchronous/background agents yourself.
Devin is perhaps the one that is most fully featured and I believe has been around the longest. Other examples that seem to be getting some attention recently are Warp, Cursor's own background agent implementation, Charlie Labs, Codegen, Tembo, and OpenAI's Codex.
I do not work for any of the aforementioned companies.
> as it is easy enough to search for asynchronous/background agents yourself.
Ah yes. An unverifiable claim followed by "just google them yourself".
> Devin is perhaps the one that is most fully featured and I believe has been around the longest.
And it had been hilariously bad the longest. Is it better now? Maybe? I don't really know anyone even mentioning Devin anymore
> examples that seem to be getting some attention recently
So, "some attention", but you could "easily find them by searching".
> Charlie Labs, Codegen, Tembo
Never heard of them, but will take a look.
See how easy it was to mention them?
>Ah yes. An unverifiable claim followed by "just google them yourself".
Some agent scaffolding performs better on benchmarks than others given the same underlying base model - see SWE Bench and Terminal Bench for examples.
Some may find certain background agents better than others simply because of UX. Some background agents have features that others don't - like memory systems, MCP, 3rd party integrations, etc.
I maintain it is easy to search for examples of background coding agents that are not Jules or Copilot. For me, searching "background coding agents" on google or duckduckgo returns some of the other examples that I mentioned.