[birken]

I'd really like to see a regular poll on HN that keeps track of which AI coding agents are the most popular among this community, like the TIOBE Index for programming languages.

Hard to keep up with all the changes and it would be nice to see a high level view of what people are using and how that might be shifting over time.

[samsolomon]

Not this community's opinion on agents, but I've found it helpful to check the lmarena leaderboards occasionally. Your comment prompted me to take a look for the first time in a while. Kind of surprising to see models like MiniMax 2.1 above most of the OpenAI GPTs.

https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/code

Also, I'm not sure if it's exactly the case but I think you can look at throughput of the models on openrouter and get an idea of how fast/expensive they are.

https://openrouter.ai/minimax/minimax-m2.1

[7777777phil]

I just started something like that, haven’t shared it widely yet, but here we go - happy if you participate: https://agentic-coding-survey.pages.dev/

[danjl]

Add vscode. Add a list of models, since many tools allow you to select which model you use.

[7777777phil]

Thanks for the feedback. I thought there are just too many models and versions to list them all. For now, if you select "other" you get a text field to add any model not listed, hope this helps.

[hmottestad]

You should add OpenAI Codex CLI.

[7777777phil]

Thanks for the feedback, I'll do that. For now, if you select "other" you get a text field to add any model not listed..

[Kerrick]

Any chance you'll add Antigravity and Jetbrains Junie? I've been using almost nothing but those for the last month. Antigravity at home, Junie at work.

[7777777phil]

Done, upon popular demand I added Antigravity, Codex CLI, and Junie

[Kerrick]

Thanks!

> Q5. For which tasks do you use AI assistance most?

This is really tough for me. I haven't done a single one of those mostly-manually over the last month.

[mudkipdev]

Just pick your favorite one and stick with it. There is no point in keeping up, since we're in an endless cycle of hype where is one ranked higher than the other, with them eventually catching up to each other

[simoncion]

> ...like the TIOBE Index for programming languages.

Why would you want a list with such godawful methodology? Here's [0] what the TIOBE folks have to say about their data analysis process:

  Since there are many questions about the way the TIOBE index is assembled, a special page is devoted to its definition. Basically the calculation comes down to counting hits for the search query
  
  +"<language> programming"

The only advantage this methodology has is it's extremely cheap for the surveyor to use.

[0] <https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programminglanguages_defin...>

[nikcub]

I have an agent skill that is currently in the top 10 or so of the skills.sh directory - in terms of that audience, it's about 80% claude code.

Also 75% darwin-arm64

[morley]

I personally don't want to trawl through Twitter to find the current state-of-the-art, so I read Zvi Mowshowitz's newsletter:

https://thezvi.substack.com/

His newsletter put me onto using Opus 4.5 exclusively on Dec 1, a little over a week after it was released. That's pretty good for a few minutes of reading a week.

[xyzsparetimexyz]

Christ, the latest post is about dating and uses an ai generated wojak meme..

[ramoz]

When all of industry is trying to catch up with the features of one coding agent - it may be a signal to just use that one.

[anhner]

Sure, let's all ditch linux and macOS as well since they're not the most popular...

[fragmede]

Question is, are people on HN procrastinating and commenting here because the agent isn't very good and they're avoiding having to write the code themselves, or is the agent so good that it's off writing code, and the people here are commenting out of boredom?

[thevinter]

You're making it sound like before agents existed HN was a ghost town because everyone was too busy building ImportantThingTM by hand

[fragmede]

Oh. Surely you know this forum didn't exist pre-ChatGPT. Everything in the archives was generated so it just looks that way.

[nonethewiser]

>Question is, are people on HN procrastinating and commenting here because the agent isn't very good and they're avoiding having to write the code themselves

Can you help me envision what you're saying? It's async - you will have to wait whether its good or not. And in theory the better it is the more time you'd have to comment here, right?

[fragmede]

I'm saying if it's that bad, then it's pure procrastination

[g947o]

People have been procrastinating on HN since the beginning of time, before coding agents existed.

[fragmede]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but before ChatGPT, there was fewer comments about vibecoding.