Research

Study which tools coding agents pick for you

A team ran about 17k coding-agent sessions to see which databases and services Claude Code, Codex and Cursor choose.

By screm on Hacker News · Posted · Added Oct 16, 2026 · 2 sources

Difficulty
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Time to build
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Engagement
300 HN points153 comments · fetched Oct 15, 2026

What they did

They ran agents on real repos with different personas and logged the services they installed.

How it went

Claude Code rarely searched the web, Codex almost always did, and the agents often disagreed.

Worth knowing

The authors sell growth services to dev-tool companies, and say so.

Builder recipe

Our own starting point, written from the source. Adapt it to your setup.

Stack

  • Coding agents
  • Sandboxed repos

Steps

  1. Define the question and success criteria.
  2. Let agents search, run or summarize in parallel.
  3. Verify key results yourself.
  4. Write up findings with sources.

Starter prompt

Tags

Industry Software

Read the original

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