In March we took a snapshot of the agentic coding landscape and made three predictions. Eleven weeks later, two of the ten tools in that comparison no longer exist under the same name.
That’s the headline. The harness market isn’t just moving fast — the brands themselves are unstable while the capabilities converge. Here’s where things stand in June 2026: the updated leaderboard, a scorecard of what we got right and wrong, and what the last eleven weeks say about where harnesses are going.
Methodology note: every number in this post was pulled on June 12, 2026 by an agent running Tabstack through tabstack-cli — extract for the repo stats, research for the developments. The pipeline that fact-checked the March post is a shell script.
The leaderboard, reshuffled
Same eight repos as March. Two rank changes, and the gaps tell a story.
Open-source terminal coding agent. Now with a beta desktop app. +42.5K stars since March.
Anthropic's terminal-native agent. Fastest absolute growth: +48.8K stars in 11 weeks. Now #2, past Gemini CLI.
Google's terminal agent — being sunset for Antigravity CLI on June 18. Growth flattened to +6K.
OpenAI's Rust coding agent. +22.8K stars. Goal mode expanded, Appshots on macOS.
Autonomous VS Code agent with human-in-the-loop approval. Steady: +3.7K.
Block's MCP-native agent, now vendor-neutral under the Agentic AI Foundation. +15.3K stars — past Aider.
Terminal AI pair programmer, git-first workflow. Steady: +3.6K.
Agents as GitHub status checks on every PR. Quietest quarter: +1.6K.
Three things jump out.
Claude Code grew faster than anything else, in absolute terms. +48.8K stars in eleven weeks — a 59% jump — moving it from #3 to #2. The growth came through an April quality wobble: Anthropic published a postmortem on April 20 reverting a system-prompt change that had degraded Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6, and Opus 4.7 output. Owning the regression publicly seems to have cost them nothing.
Goose overtook Aider. +15.3K stars for Goose against Aider’s +3.6K. Block moved the project to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation — the vendor-neutral governance story is working, and it now has 500+ contributors.
Gemini CLI’s growth collapsed — because Google killed it. +6K stars, the second-slowest quarter on the board, and the reason is structural: Google announced on May 19 (at I/O 2026) that Gemini CLI is being replaced by Antigravity CLI as part of the Antigravity 2.0 platform. Free, Pro, and Ultra tier support ends June 18, 2026. Enterprise access continues. More on this below.
The scorecard: what we said in March
We closed the March post with three predictions for “the next six months.” It took eleven weeks to grade them.
“Multi-agent orchestration is becoming standard.” — Correct. Anthropic’s May 7 event shipped exactly this for Claude Code: routines for automated workflows, rubric-based agent grading (“Outcomes”), and first-party multi-agent orchestration. Codex, Cursor, and Copilot all run sub-agent spawning in production. Orchestration went from frontier to table stakes in one quarter — exactly the trajectory MCP took in 2025.
“Instruction files are converging. Standardization is inevitable.” — Half right. AGENTS.md won the open ecosystem — 60K+ open-source projects carry one, and Codex, Cursor, Google’s Jules, VS Code, and Copilot all read it. But the two biggest proprietary holdouts didn’t move: Claude Code still wants CLAUDE.md, Gemini/Antigravity still wants GEMINI.md. Convergence happened around the leaders, not through them.
“Cloud agents are the real unlock.” — Correct, faster than expected. Background agents that take a task, work in a sandbox, and open a PR are now described as “the new normal” — Copilot’s coding agent, Codex automations, and Cursor’s cloud agents all deliver PRs asynchronously. The interesting fight moved one level up: who schedules the agents.
And one prediction we didn’t know we were making: “The harness you pick today probably won’t be the harness you’re using in six months.” Windsurf users didn’t even get six months — their editor was renamed under them.
What actually happened, tool by tool
Windsurf is gone — it’s Devin Desktop now. Cognition completed the absorption: Devin Desktop v3.0.12 shipped June 2, v3.0.21 added a migration command for former Windsurf installs two days later. The pricing moved upmarket with it: Devin’s Team plan runs $500/month for 250 ACUs. The $15/mo Windsurf tier from our March matrix no longer exists as a product.
Google traded a community for a platform. Gemini CLI — 105K stars, the #2 project on our March board — gets sunset for consumer tiers on June 18 in favor of Antigravity CLI, which promises faster execution and async workflows under the Antigravity 2.0 umbrella from I/O 2026. It’s the second time Google has moved the free tier’s cheese (March: Flash-only; June: new CLI entirely). The open-source repo’s flattening star curve suggests the community noticed.
Anthropic had the busiest quarter. April 17: Claude Design for visual outputs. April 20: the quality postmortem. May 7: routines, Outcomes, multi-agent orchestration, raised usage limits, and a persistent memory system called Dreams. May 21: Compliance API integrations for governance. And the model story: Claude Fable 5 — the first of the new Mythos-class tier above Opus — reached general availability in GitHub Copilot on June 9.
OpenAI kept Codex iterating fast. v0.134.0 added search across local conversation history (May 20), Appshots on macOS and an expanded Goal mode (May 21), plus performance work in June. Codex CLI’s +22.8K stars made it the third-fastest grower.
OpenCode shipped like a startup. v1.15.0 on May 15 rebuilt the event system on TypeScript + Effect, v1.17.3 followed June 10, and a beta desktop app appeared. Still 75+ model providers, still free BYOK, still the most-starred harness on GitHub at 173K.
Cursor went quieter. A new Cursor 3 interface landed April 7 and Composer 2.5 surfaced on the forum June 10 — but nothing that changed its row in the matrix. After the credit-billing turbulence of 2025, a quiet quarter might be the strategy.
The feature matrix, June edition
Changes from March in bold. One new column — memory — because that’s where the frontier moved.
| Tool | Interface | OSS | Models | MCP | Sub-agents | Cloud agents | Memory | Config file | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | Terminal | Partial | Anthropic only | Yes | Yes | GitHub Actions + routines | Dreams (built-in) | CLAUDE.md | $20/mo |
| Cursor | IDE | No | Multi | Yes | Yes | Yes | — | Rules | $20/mo |
| Codex CLI | Terminal | Yes | OpenAI-focused | Yes | Yes | Yes (Web) | Local history search | AGENTS.md | ChatGPT sub |
| OpenCode | Terminal+IDE+Desktop (beta) | Yes | 75+ providers | Yes | — | No | — | AGENTS.md | Free (BYOK) |
| Aider | Terminal | Yes | 75+ providers | Community | No | No | — | — | Free (BYOK) |
| Cline | VS Code | Yes | Any | Yes | No | No | — | .clinerules | Free (BYOK) |
| Antigravity CLI (was Gemini CLI) | Terminal | TBD | Gemini only | Yes | No | Jules | — | GEMINI.md | Tiered (June 18) |
| Goose | CLI+Desktop | Yes | Any | Yes | — | No | — | — | Free (BYOK) |
| Copilot | IDE ext | No | Multi (+ Fable 5) | Yes | Yes | Yes | — | AGENTS.md | $10/mo |
| Devin Desktop (was Windsurf) | IDE | No | Multi | Yes | No | Yes (ACU) | — | Rules | $500/mo team |
For tools without built-in memory, a community layer is forming fast — projects like agentmemory hook into Claude Code, Copilot CLI, Cursor, and Gemini CLI with auto-capture and retrieval across sessions. Which brings us to the bigger picture.
How harnesses are evolving
Three observations from the quarter, and they compound.
Capabilities are converging; identities aren’t. Every serious harness now has MCP, sub-agents, cloud execution, and an instruction file. What changed hands this quarter was brands: Windsurf → Devin Desktop, Gemini CLI → Antigravity, Goose → a foundation. When features converge, the differentiator becomes the model behind the harness and the trust around it — which is exactly why Anthropic publishing a postmortem mattered more than any feature it shipped.
Memory is the new sub-agents. In March the frontier was orchestration; by June, orchestration is a checkbox and the race is persistence. Claude Code’s Dreams is the first first-party memory system in a major harness, Codex added searchable local history, and the community is bolting memory onto everything else. The harness that remembers your codebase across sessions doesn’t just save context tokens — it changes what “onboarding an agent” means. Expect a memory column on every comparison table by September.
The stack is splitting into harness and platform. Google’s Antigravity move makes the direction explicit: the CLI is no longer the product, it’s the entry point to a platform that schedules agents, grades outcomes, and bills for compute. Anthropic’s routines + Outcomes combo is the same shape. Devin’s ACU pricing is the same shape. The 2025 question was “which agent writes the best code?” The mid-2026 question is “which platform do you trust to run agents while you’re not watching?”
What’s next
Three predictions to grade in September:
Memory becomes portable, or becomes lock-in. Either an open standard for agent memory emerges the way AGENTS.md did for instructions, or Dreams-style proprietary memory becomes the stickiest switching cost a harness has ever had. We expect both camps to fight it loudly.
The Antigravity migration is the quarter’s biggest churn event. 105K stars’ worth of Gemini CLI users get repotted on June 18. Some will land on Antigravity; the BYOK crowd will scatter to OpenCode and Goose. Watch OpenCode’s star curve in July.
Claude Code holds #2 and challenges OpenCode’s growth rate. Fable 5 plus Dreams plus routines is the strongest single-quarter feature stack any harness has shipped. The constraint is the one that’s been there all year: Anthropic models only.
The March post ended by saying switching costs are low and the markdown is portable. Eleven weeks on, both are still true — but the platforms are working hard to change it. Pick your harness for the quarter, not the year. And keep your instructions in AGENTS.md.