Comment by screm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by screm | Hacker News Reader

Hey!

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!

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.

Hey, thanks for the feedback, the leaderboards aren't displaying well on mobile indeed, we are currently shipping a fix that should help with that. Thanks anyway!

FWIW I had the same reaction to the popups. Immediately closed the tab.

Yep makes sense I’m relaxing them

It should be better now, including in mobile, thanks both for the feedback!

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.

First time?

"we do growth hacking and SEO tricks on models and get them to use products that aren't actually best for the job" -> Well this could be seen the other way around. Today, without proper promotion of services, only incumbents / leaders that are in the models priors (from their training data) are getting chosen. This is ultimately favoring the big generalist players and not the newer or more tailored solutions that benefit from less exposure. I truly think there is something to be done to improve developers' experience too!

> 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.

Gemini CLI (at least mine) does web research all the time. I've noticed it hitting my own pages (I have to ask very specific things). I don't have any global or project rules to encourage that behavior.

That’s a deliberate effort on Google’s part. Integrating AI and search is obviously pretty critical to their business.

Must be system prompts and tool instructions guiding the agents differently.

OpenAI is close to Microsoft so I assume that they have preferential and cheap access to the Bing search index.

Claude is independent.

Gemini should have Google search.

More likely the harness than the model or a search deal. In Claude Code, WebFetch prompts for permission per domain and WebSearch is a separately gated tool, so the cheapest path for the agent is almost always the files already in the repo. Codex has no equivalent friction in front of a fetch.

Worth checking against your own permission settings before reading it as a model preference: allowlist a domain and the same agent will reach for it a lot more.

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.

Not sure I got your question right but if you are wondering for your own coding agent then I guess the answer would be a skill? Here what I meant by "how to influence coding agents choices and get products picked" is from a vendor PoV, making sure any developer x codebase in the world asking for a tool in your category gets your tool recommended and implemented by the coding agent.

Obviously you can ask the agent to use a specific tool, but the point of this article is about what they choose when the human on the other end has no opinion/taste/clue.

Exactly!

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