Industry report

Last updated: June 2026

State of Coding Agents
Mid-2026

A data-driven overview of the 26 AI coding agents shaping how software gets built: who makes them, where they run, how they interoperate, and where the ecosystem is heading.

26Agents indexedAcross the landscape

25VendorsxAI owns two agents

13 / 13Open / ClosedAn even split

100%Support AGENTS.mdUniversal standard

96%Support MCPNear-universal

13New in 2025The breakout year

The Agents

26 agents, 26 vendors

The full field of AI coding agents tracked in this report, from frontier labs to independent startups. Hover to pause; tap any logo to visit its vendor.

Timeline

The 2025 explosion

2025 was the breakout year. Half of all agents indexed (13 of 26) launched in a single year, driven by terminal agents and big-tech entrants.

2025 alone produced 13 new agents, as many as 2021 through 2024 combined. The pace has not slowed: 2026 is already on the board with three more.

2021 (1)

GitHub Copilot launches as the first major AI coding assistant.Released this year

GitHub Copilot

2023 (4)

Cursor and Zed arrive as IDE-first approaches begin.Released this year

Factory
Cursor
Zed
Aider

2024 (5)

Devin launches as the first "AI software engineer," an autonomous cloud agent.Released this year

Devin
OpenHands
Augment Code
Warp
Cline

2025 (13)

The breakout year. Claude Code accelerates the terminal-agent wave; OpenAI ships Codex; Google enters with Antigravity. Cognition AI acquires Windsurf.Released this year

Junie
Trae
Goose
Claude Code
VS Code (agent mode)
Kilo Code
Codex
Amp
opencode
Kiro
Qwen Code
Antigravity
Mistral Vibe

2026 (YTD) (3)

xAI and Xiaomi join as even more big-tech entrants arrive. xAI acquires Cursor.Released this year

Command Code
Grok Build
MiMo Code

Where They Live

The terminal is the universal surface

Agents can span multiple surfaces. 24 of 26 ship a terminal/CLI interface, but the trend is multi-surface: 18 of 26 (69%) run on two or more, and 14 span three or more.

Terminal

24 · 92%

IDE Extension

11 · 42%

Web

11 · 42%

Desktop

9 · 35%

IDE (full)

7 · 27%

Multi-surface is the direction of travel. The terminal is the lowest common denominator, but the leading platforms increasingly span editor, web, and desktop too.

Terminal-only purists (6)CLI-first workflows, nothing else.

Aider
Amp
Command Code
Grok Build
Mistral Vibe
Qwen Code

Most surfaces, 4 categories (4)Meet developers wherever they are.

Augment Code
Claude Code
Devin
Factory

IDE-only (2)Editors that add agents natively.

VS Code
Zed

Standards Stack

A shared interoperability stack is emerging

Seven standards are converging across the ecosystem. AGENTS.md is universal, MCP and Skills are near-universal, and even newer standards like hooks are catching up fast.

Rules (AGENTS.md)Repo-level instruction files agents read for project context and conventions

26/26 · 100%

SkillsReusable, packaged skill modules that extend agents with task-specific capabilities

25/26 · 96%

MCPModel Context Protocol, an open standard for connecting agents to external tools and data

25/26 · 96%

Custom Models / BYOKSupport for plugging in custom, self-hosted, or bring-your-own-key model endpoints

22/26 · 85%

SubagentsSupport for spawning or orchestrating sub-agents to delegate tasks within workflows

22/26 · 85%

PluginsPlugin/extension systems for third-party integrations and custom tools

20/26 · 77%

HooksLifecycle hooks that trigger custom behavior in response to agent events

19/26 · 73%

AGENTS.md is the de facto standard. 25 of 26 agents read AGENTS.md for project context. 17 agents support all seven standards; the laggards are Aider (2/7), Warp (3/7), Zed (3/7), and VS Code (4/7).

Interoperability

Standard convergence, implementation divergence

Agents agree on AGENTS.md, but beyond that each reads its own sprawl of proprietary rule files. .agents/skills/ is winning as the shared path for skills, yet 25 agents collectively maintain 30 distinct skills directories.

Rules file

AGENTS.md25 of 26

Proprietary rules

.cursor/rules, .windsurfrules, …26 of 26 (each has its own)

Skills directory

.agents/skills/15 of 26 (30 distinct paths)

Claude rules compat

CLAUDE.md10 of 26 (cross-compatible)

MCP config

.mcp.json3 (emerging)

Everyone reads AGENTS.md — then diverges. 25 of 26 agents read AGENTS.md for project context, but each also reads its own proprietary instruction files. .agents/skills/ is the closest thing to a shared skills path, yet the 25 agents that support skills collectively use 30 distinct directory paths. The standard is settled; the implementation is not.

Open vs Closed

An exact 50/50 split

Thirteen agents are open source and thirteen are closed, a remarkably even balance for a fast-moving market.

Open vs closed source

26agents

Open source 13 (50%)

Closed source 13 (50%)

OSS license breakdown

13OSS

Apache-2.0 6 (46%)

MIT 5 (38%)

AGPL-3.0 1 (8%)

GPL-3.0 1 (8%)

GitHub stars: open-source repos (June 2026)

VS Code

187k

opencode

180k

Claude Code

135k

Codex

94k

Zed

86k

OpenHands

79k

Cline

64k

Warp

63k

Goose

50k

Aider

47k

Qwen Code

26k

Kilo Code

25k

Mistral Vibe

Open at the edges. Several closed-source agents still publish their CLI as open source (for example, Claude Code's repo on GitHub) while the cloud platform stays proprietary. The boundary between open and closed is blurrier than the 50/50 split suggests.

Big Tech vs Startups

Big tech ties with startups, 13 to 13

Every major AI lab now ships a coding agent (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Mistral, Amazon) alongside Chinese giants Alibaba, Xiaomi, and ByteDance. xAI owns two: Cursor and Grok Build.

Big tech & major AI labs (13)

AntigravityGoogle

Claude CodeAnthropic

CodexOpenAI

CursorxAI

GitHub CopilotGitHub

Grok BuildxAI

JunieJetBrains

KiroAmazon

MiMo CodeXiaomi

Mistral VibeMistral AI

Qwen CodeAlibaba

TraeByteDance

VS CodeMicrosoft

Independent & startup (13)

AiderAider-AI

AmpAmp

Augment CodeAugment Code

ClineCline

Command CodeCommandCodeAI

DevinCognition AI

FactoryFactory

GooseAgentic AI Foundation (Linux Foundation)

Kilo CodeKilo Code

opencodeAnomaly

OpenHandsAll Hands AI

WarpWarp

ZedZed Industries

Coding agents are now essential infrastructure. The fact that every frontier lab has shipped one, and that three Chinese tech giants are all in, signals the category has moved from experiment to strategic priority.

What's Next

Seven trends shaping the next phase

Where the coding-agent ecosystem is heading, based on the patterns visible across all 26 agents tracked here.

1The terminal won, then expanded

Nearly every agent started terminal-first, then expanded to IDE, web, and desktop. The terminal remains the lowest-common-denominator surface, with 24 of 26 agents shipping a CLI.

2Standards are converging fast

AGENTS.md went from 0 to universal in ~18 months, and MCP is following the same curve. The interoperability stack of rules, skills, hooks, MCP, plugins, subagents, and custom models is becoming table stakes.

3Multi-agent orchestration is the new frontier

22 of 26 agents now support subagents, the ability to spawn child agents for parallel work. This points toward workflows where multiple agents collaborate on complex tasks.

4BYOK is the norm

22 of 26 agents support custom or bring-your-own-key models. Vendor lock-in on the model layer is weakening as developers expect to choose their own backends.

5Every major AI lab has an agent

OpenAI (Codex), Anthropic (Claude Code), Google (Antigravity), xAI (Grok Build), Mistral (Vibe), plus Chinese labs Alibaba, Xiaomi, and ByteDance. Coding agents are now essential infrastructure.

6Open source holds at 50%

The ecosystem maintains a healthy balance between open and closed. Many closed-source agents still open-source their CLI components while keeping the cloud platform proprietary.

7The IDE wars are back

Cursor, Trae, Kiro, and Zed are all AI-native IDEs competing for attention, while VS Code and JetBrains defend their territory with agent integrations like Copilot and Junie.

State of Coding AgentsMid-2026