Every one of these four will run a coding agent for you. The interesting question isn’t can they run code — it’s where can you run them from. I’m looking at CodeNomad, Kandev, Paseo, and Orca through a mobile-first lens, because that’s the axis they actually separate on. Two of them ship real phone apps. One is a desktop cockpit that happens to have a browser mode. One is a governance workbench that assumes you’re sitting at the desk. That difference tells you more about each project’s philosophy than any feature list.
Two open-source terminal agents want your dev workflow, but they come from opposite ends of the design spectrum. Ante is a bare-metal engineering statement — one ~15MB Rust binary that runs like Claude Code or Codex with none of their dependencies or model constraints. Crow is a deliberately small, boring ACP-native agent whose entire thesis is that persistence isn’t an afterthought — every session lands in a queryable local sqlite file anyone can read.
Two open-source multi-agent orchestrators are fighting for the same job — “manage several AI coding agents from one place” — but they come at it from opposite directions. Kandev is a review-first development workspace wrapped around a kanban board. Omnigent is a policy-and-sandbox framework that treats every agent harness as a swappable driver. Same problem, totally different philosophies.
Full disclosure up front: I already run Kandev on my dev box, so I’m not neutral here. All numbers below were fetched from GitHub at publish time.
Obsidian has quietly become the front end for AI agents. Two plugins make that work: Agent Client and its fork Agent Console. Both run Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, and any other ACP-compatible agent inside your vault, let you @mention notes for context, and surface permission prompts before anything runs.
Same foundation (the Agent Client Protocol, the same JSON-RPC stdio transport Hermes uses over ACP). But they’ve diverged hard.
Agent Client by RAIT-09 is the ancestor. It’s the biggest and most battle-tested — 2,358 stars, 227k+ community downloads, 504k+ release downloads, Apache-2.0, TypeScript.
Here’s the scenario: You have OpenCode running as your ACP agent. IntelliJ IDEA connects via one plugin. AgentBridge connects via another. Both work fine individually. Run them at the same time? One breaks.
This isn’t a bug in your IDE plugin. It’s not a bug in AgentBridge. It’s an architectural property of how OpenCode’s ACP transport works.
OpenCode’s opencode acp command uses stdio transport — JSON-RPC 2.0 messages flow over a single stdin/stdout pipe. The relevant code in packages/opencode/src/cli/cmd/acp.ts creates one WritableStream for stdout and one ReadableStream for stdin. These are wrapped by ndJsonStream from the @agentclientprotocol/sdk for newline-delimited JSON framing.
The Agent Client Protocol (ACP) is a JSON-RPC standard that lets different AI coding agents talk to each other. Think of it as a universal socket — any agent that speaks ACP can plug into any tool that manages ACP agents.
Hermes Agent ships an ACP adapter (hermes acp), version 0.19.0. That’s the plumbing. The interesting part is what you can plug it into.
hcom is a cross-agent messaging layer (SQLite-based). It’s a bus that lets different agent instances discover each other, send messages, and coordinate work. Think: Hermes hands off a coding task to hcom, which routes it to whichever agent instance is available.
The coding agent space is moving fast. Really fast. It feels like every week there’s a new agent claiming to be faster, cheaper, or smarter than the last. I spent some time digging through the latest entrants to see what’s actually novel and what’s just another Claude Code wrapper.
Here’s what I found.
Before diving into the agents themselves, there’s an important backdrop: the Agent Client Protocol (ACP). Think of it as MCP but for agents — a standard way for IDEs, CLIs, and other tools to discover, authenticate, and communicate with coding agents.
