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.

• nullbio

  today at 4:33 AM

  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.

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 for every use case you’re well suited to.

• tiffanyh

  today at 2:58 AM

  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.

  • appplication

    today at 3:40 AM

    Maybe but that future isn’t now and there’s real money to be made today with the above strategy.

• hexapus

  today at 3:22 AM

  Well that's a horrifying thought. Thanks, I hate it.

• Freedom2

  today at 2:29 AM

  [dead]

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?

• nijave

  today at 2:51 AM

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

  • nullbio

    today at 4:37 AM

    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.

• rcfox

  today at 2:29 AM

  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?

  • pjm331

    today at 2:59 AM

    The Edit tool has been notoriously tricky to get right - it seems they have maybe branched out but I think morphllm started specifically with the pitch that they trained a small model to be good at editing files - most of their testimonials are about that

    But I think it’s mostly a solved problem in frontier models and the bash tool usage is more likely an attempt to be more token efficient - I’ve noticed it used for making mechanical bulk edits that would be numerous “edit” tool uses otherwise

• ryeguy

  today at 2:34 AM

  What does this question have to do with the linked article?

I only get web search from Claude Code when I ask, only one of my last 8 sessions accessed the web at all. But they were the case of Opus here. Curious what Fable 5.1 model does instead of Opus.

I've been tracking the same for a few months. All open source and available here: https://preseason.ai/

• negativefactori

  today at 2:49 AM

  nice!

Really liked that "Go Full Screen" as a modal flow, surprisingly intuitive.

I remember when the SEO nightmare started, it looked like an innocent intelectual investigation exercise like this.

Azure database??? In house bot protection??? In house search???

Some of these are absolutely wild. Surprised Strands didn't even get mentioned for agent frameworks.

I smell a money-making opportunity.

• screm

  yesterday at 11:05 PM

  Haha there is a lot at stake for sure

In the future: "I went ahead and built the database you requested using today's tool sponsor: Firebase"

• BikiniPrince

  today at 2:00 AM

  The framework recommendations are always funny, but the worst is database layout. I made the mistake of assuming it has some reasonable sense.

• pupppet

  yesterday at 11:23 PM

  Ugh...this is totally going to happen.

  • Onavo

    today at 12:31 AM

    Not going to name names but it's already happening with the frontier labs as a revenue source.

    • folkrav

      today at 1:29 AM

      I feel like you legitimately cannot say it for legal reasons, but I wish we would just name these freaking things.

      • paulhebert

        today at 1:35 AM

        Didn’t OpenAI claim they’re going to make a billion dollars off ads in a year or something?

• screm

  yesterday at 11:04 PM

  Yeah sounds kind of like the equivalent of SEA for AI agents (AEA?) except that it’s sneakier since agents can act without you noticing.. anyway this is in the hands of the labs

  • edoceo

    today at 1:06 AM

    Is SEA Search Engine Advertising? So AEA is Agent Engine Advertising?

Redshift for databases ain’t even here. This is suspect.

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!

• josephg

  yesterday at 10:33 PM

  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.

  • screm

    yesterday at 10:38 PM

    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!

    • kouteiheika

      yesterday at 10:55 PM

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

      • screm

        yesterday at 11:09 PM

        Yep makes sense I’m relaxing them

        • screm

          yesterday at 11:42 PM

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

• hbarka

  today at 12:15 AM

  > 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.

  • arcanemachiner

    today at 3:54 AM

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

  • edoceo

    today at 1:10 AM

    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.

• vivifkjo

  yesterday at 10:26 PM

  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.

  • screm

    yesterday at 10:33 PM

    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.

  • watusername

    yesterday at 10:34 PM

    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.

    • screm

      yesterday at 10:38 PM

      Exactly!

• ai_critic

  today at 12:22 AM

  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.

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Can we not encourage the same strip-mining and ad and SEO bullshit that previously ruined the last decade+ of the Internet?

A large portion of the utility of AI is the barren ad-driven growth-hacked hellscape search has become. Don't encourage the next generation of these businesses, I beg of everyone.

• edoceo

  today at 1:08 AM

  Large amounts of capital want this to happen? Outside of boycott, what else can be done.

  What can man do against such reckless ~hate~ money?

• folkrav

  today at 1:31 AM

  It is probably already happening, and will get worse. OpenAI was boasting about their advertising revenue mere days ago.

  If we felt like we couldn't trust AI because of slop, soon we won't be able to trust it because it'll push whatever pays them to do it.

  • DrewADesign

    today at 2:19 AM

    And while these sponsorship shenanigans are the tech business’s bread and butter, sponsored answer manipulation seems fundamentally more insidious. Even in a larger-scale measurement like this one, there’s no way to tell if any of that is sponsored, legitimately good recommendations, or the technical flavor of the goblins problem.

the 17k runs are the real headline here, not which tool won. we finally have someone measuring the thing everyone else is just vibing about.

• mpalmer

  today at 2:53 AM

  Using LLMs to write comments is against guidelines, even if you make the text lowercase.

Looking at this, maybe in the future, the tools that AI prefers will become the mainstream. Even now, the tools that AI gives the highest priority to are the ones people already choose. There might be a concentration effect toward the tools that AI selects

• screm

  yesterday at 10:35 PM

  Definitely! But about concentration I'm not so sure, there are ways to counter this effect so in the end it will be a fight like SEO is today. What is certain though is that getting recommended by coding agents will be a top prio for all dev tools.