The answer to “which coding agent should we standardise on?” is really simple: Don’t.
The tradeoffs of the different models are complicated and difficult to wrap your head around, and if you have the resources to try a bunch and form a conclusion, next week new models will come out and change the equation in small but difficult-to-understand ways again.
The solution is to ask your engineers which models they like, get them access to as many of those as you can, and expect their preferences to change and price that in.
“But I don’t have the budget to buy subscriptions to all the models my engineers want! And there are compliance issues with some of them!”
Note that I didn’t say you have to get access to all of them: as many as you can. And try to push the envelope as much as possible. Get creative. Perhaps give engineers a $200/mo AI coding budget and let them pick from a selection of subscriptions. You’re going to have different engineers using different AI coding tools, and if you refuse to let them, your competitors will.
Maybe in the future “standardizing on one coding agent” will be a thing that makes sense. But that time is not now.
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