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.
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.
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.
