There’s a whole category of open-source tools now that are all trying to be the minimal terminal coding agent — a small, fast, self-contained harness you run in your shell instead of a heavyweight IDE-integrated tool. They look nearly identical from the outside: type a prompt, watch the agent read files, run commands, and edit code.
But underneath, they’re chasing five different questions. This is a comparison of Ante, Crow, Maki, 3code, and Hax — five agents in that same space, and an honest look at which ones are genuinely different versus which are just the same idea wearing different languages.
