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.
The big gap in AI agents isn’t intelligence — it’s hands. An LLM can write a perfect playbook, but if it can’t hold a persistent interactive session, follow a live log, drive the SSH client through a password prompt, or watch the browser as it runs, it’s still stuck translating thought into brittle one-shot tool calls.
I went looking at what’s actually shipping right now to give agents a real computer. Six repos, three distinct layers: full sandboxes, interactive PTY servers, and browser control. Here’s how they stack up.
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.
