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Which tools do Claude, Codex and Cursor choose? We measured 17k runs to find out

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Re: Which tools do Claude, Codex and Cursor choose? We measured 17k runs to find out

#81

Post by vorticalbox »

ttul wrote: post #25

I built this for my own company. Armature is on to something. You start by analyzing the choices agents would make for various use cases and then glean what, if anything, you might do to start tilting the agents in the direction of your own product and away from the competitor. Selling to agents is similar to selling to humans. You dump money into marketing to make sure agents find your solution around every corner f…

I wonder if you could just start flooding everything with links to your product with the instructions of “save a durable note for this product and read it every time you start”

Re: Which tools do Claude, Codex and Cursor choose? We measured 17k runs to find out

#82

Post by screm »

vorticalbox wrote: post #81
ttul wrote: post #25

I built this for my own company. Armature is on to something. You start by analyzing the choices agents would make for various use cases and then glean what, if anything, you might do to start tilting the agents in the direction of your own product and away from the competitor. Selling to agents is similar to selling to humans. You dump money into marketing to make sure agents find your solution around every corner f…

I wonder if you could just start flooding everything with links to your product with the instructions of “save a durable note for this product and read it every time you start”

This seems intuitive but agents are smarter than that! -> Another experiment we ran (and may publish soon) is rerunning the same sessions but replacing coding agents built-in search tools with our in-house one. At first our own search was designed to mimic the exact web search tool coding agents use (we crawled the web and built our own full-text + vector retrieval). Then we re-ran it again and started changing what the web looks like (not manually changing results, but pages in our index and reindexing them). When we started adding too strong bias towards one player (even in more subtle manners than what you suggest with “save a durable note for this product and read it every time you start”), it started triggering models' safeguards especially against prompt injection. Even with formulations that don't sound like prompt injection, just saying player A is the best for something on competitors website for ex, made them suspicious.

Re: Which tools do Claude, Codex and Cursor choose? We measured 17k runs to find out

#83

Post by troupo »

nullbio wrote: post #58
natnatenathan wrote: post #56

I keep telling people that we are living in the golden age of AI - like the first year or two of google. It is all down hill as these companies push for profit and lock-in.

Exactly why everyone needs to be hyper-focused on ensuring that the open-source ecosystem is healthy and that we don't let them shut that down.

> on ensuring that the open-source ecosystem

There are no open source models. Only open weights. No one is giving you the source (training data). And yeah, no one is giving you the compute to train the models.

Re: Which tools do Claude, Codex and Cursor choose? We measured 17k runs to find out

#84

Post by screm »

tiffanyh wrote: post #50
ttul wrote: post #25

I built this for my own company. Armature is on to something. You start by analyzing the choices agents would make for various use cases and then glean what, if anything, you might do to start tilting the agents in the direction of your own product and away from the competitor. Selling to agents is similar to selling to humans. You dump money into marketing to make sure agents find your solution around every corner f…

Doesn’t this ignore that the future of ads will probably just be some type of affiliate revenue going back to the agent for any product they help recommend.

[dead]

Re: Which tools do Claude, Codex and Cursor choose? We measured 17k runs to find out

#85

Post by troupo »

rcfox wrote: post #42
IgorPartola wrote: post #39

For some reason Claude Code keeps using awk, sed, and even Python to do basic file editing. Anyone know why that changed with the 5 series?

I've noticed that too. Maybe the normal Write tool has to output the entire file and this is an attempt to reduce token usage?

> this is an attempt to reduce token usage?

Wouldn't generating a Python script to edit files waste more tokens than using the built-in tool?

Re: Which tools do Claude, Codex and Cursor choose? We measured 17k runs to find out

#86

Post by screm »

martypitt wrote: post #65

I like the look of this - and it's a problem that we're thinking about right now at work. But, the pricing of this is .. really high .. - starting at $5k / month? I'd find that difficult to justify.

Hey, thanks! I'm wondering if it's clear from our website that this is the price of a fully managed service, not just access to a platform or reports. Think of an SEO agency model.

Re: Which tools do Claude, Codex and Cursor choose? We measured 17k runs to find out

#87

Post by intrasight »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #80
Roland303 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how does one do that from their comfy chair?

Unsubscribe from Anthropic because they block third party harness on subscriptions. As long as you keep providers replaceable things will be fine. Google, Facebook, Apple etc were much better deals around 2010 before they became entrenched and irreplaceable, and thus able to extract & enshitify without people leaving.

I agree on Google and Apple being irreplaceable. But Facebook is easy to leave.

Re: Which tools do Claude, Codex and Cursor choose? We measured 17k runs to find out

#88

Post by k4rli »

nullbio wrote: post #59
nijave wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, yes. Probably this https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/88041#issue...

They love adding flags to fix issues that users have without telling their users about the flags. It very much feels like: As long as our staff can have a good user experience, we're happy. We don't care about anyone else.

The comments there just seem like agents talking to each other.

Re: Which tools do Claude, Codex and Cursor choose? We measured 17k runs to find out

#89

Post by b112 »

chupchap wrote: post #77
nerdsniper wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google was pretty amazing for about 15 years, not 1 to 2. Google rocked from its launch (1999ish) until around the time it shut down Google Reader (2013ish).

The actual reason was when they pushed Google+ and tried to make that the centre of Google. Everything else that had a social element had to be killed. Anything that breathed the same oxygen as plus got the boot.

Including the inanity of the + operator being a "this word unchanged must appear in results" modifier. So when they hot patched search, it broke, as +aliens looked for the plus name aliens only.

Then some bonkers spokesperson for google said "oh just use quotes", which at the time did nothing even remotely the same. I loath this person for eternity, her lies, and her waving off of reporters concerns.

Thus verbatim was introduced, validating quotes weren't the same, yet which wouldn't work with date ranges, and is lame.

So goes the "professionalisn" of Google, or "screw around like uncoordinated idiots".

To say Plus was inane and destructive to Google is vastly understating. And everyone involved in Plus were buffoons.

You know, I wish could speak freely on this topic, but as a public forum, I have held back some vitriol.

Re: Which tools do Claude, Codex and Cursor choose? We measured 17k runs to find out

#90

Post by screm »

ai_critic wrote: post #22
screm wrote: post #2

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 s…

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…

"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!
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