I really wish there were a de facto state-of-the-art coding agent that is LLM-agnostic, so that LLM providers wouldn't bother reinventing their own wheels like Codex and Gemini-CLI. They should be pluggable providers, not independent programs. In this way, the CLI would focus on refining the agentic logic and would grow faster than ever before.
Currently Claude Code is the best, but I don't think Anthropic would pivot it into what I described. Maybe we still need to wait for the next groundbreaking open-source coding agent to come out.
Opencode (from SST; not the thing that got rebranded as Crush) seems to be just that. I've had a very good experience with it for the last couple of days; having previously used gemini-cli quite a bit. Opencode also has/hosts a couple of "free" models options right now, which are quite decent IMO.
https://github.com/sst/opencode
There are many many similar alternatives, so here's a random sampling: Crush, Aider, Amp Code, Emacs with gptel/acp-shell, Editor Code Assistant (which aims for an editor-agnostic backend that plugs into different editors)
Finally... there is quite a lot of scope for co-designing the affordances / primitives supported by the coding agent and the LLM backing it (especially in LLM post-training). So factorizing these two into completely independent pieces currently seems unlikely to give the most powerful capabilities.
There is Aider (aider.chat), and it has been there for couple years now. Great tool.
Alas, you don't install Claude Code or Gemini CLI for the actual CLI tool. You install it because the only way agentic coding makes sense is through subscription billing at the vendor - SOTA models burns through tokens too fast for pay-per-use API billing to make sense here; we're talking literally a day of basic use costing more than a monthly subscription to the Max plan at $200 or so.
Aider is in a sad state. The maintainer does not "maintain" for quite some time now (look at the open PRs and issues). It's not state of the art definitely but one of the first and best ones in the past. A fork was created, Aider CE, from some members of the Discord community https://github.com/dwash96/aider-ce The fork looks and works promising but there is (sadly) so much more development in the other AI CLI tools nowadays.
I came to the same conclusion. It's crickets over there: https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/graphs/contributors
> I really wish there were a de facto state-of-the-art coding agent that is LLM-agnostic
Cursor?
It’s really quite good.
Ironically it has its own LLM now, https://cursor.com/blog/composer, so it’s sort of going the other way.
It’s not gonna happen any time soon. The model is fine-tuned on traces generated by the scaffolding (eg dependent on what tool calls are available), and the scaffolding is co-developed with the strengths/weaknesses of the specific model.
There are actually a lot of those! One of the best things about using them is that you can swap models around at will.
I love to switch models and ask them what they thought of the previous models answer
I think Claude Code is the best because it is not agnostic.
exactly!
Model agnostic tools I would say:
Roo Code or maybe Kilo (which is a fork of Roo)
Goose?