What to compare in a terminal coding agent
Terminal coding agents differ in a few ways that matter day to day. Here is a checklist, and what agnt does for each.
- Model choice
- Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, Gemini, DeepSeek, Groq, xAI, Mistral with your own keys, plus Ollama, LM Studio and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
- Parallel agents
- /team seats a lead with an architect, coder, reviewer and tester working at the same time. You can talk to any of them mid-run.
- Request efficiency
- Batched tool calls, parallel file reads, prompt caching and context compaction mean fewer round-trips.
- Self-verification
- Diagnostics run after every edit, and the project's typecheck or tests run before the agent finishes. A failing stop hook sends it back to work.
- Safety
- Four modes (ask, auto, plan, free), allow and deny rules, per-edit snapshots, /undo, /rewind and git worktrees.
- Extensibility
- MCP servers, plugins, skills, hooks, custom skins, scheduled and looping prompts.
- Platforms
- One binary for Linux and Windows.
- Remote access
- /rc opens your session on your phone through a QR code, with no app or account.
Try it: install agnt or read the docs.