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Three terminal-native coding agents, three different bets. OpenCode wagers on model freedom, Grok Build on parallel sub-agents, Claude Code on depth of tooling. Here’s how to pick the one that fits your team.
Six months ago this was a one-horse race. You used Claude Code, or you didn’t use an agentic CLI. That’s not true anymore. There are now three terminal-native agents with real adoption, and each one made a different bet about what actually matters in this category.
OpenCode bet that lock-in is the enemy. The agent loop is a commodity; the model behind it should be swappable, auditable, and self-hostable. Grok Build bet on orchestration: parallel sub-agents, a plan-first execution gate, and a model that’s improving fast even though it isn’t the current benchmark leader. Claude Code bet on depth. Subagents, skills, hooks, MCP integration, and a year-plus of production hardening that the other two haven’t had time to accumulate yet.
None of these bets is wrong. They’re just different, and the tool you pick shapes how your team works for months. This article breaks down how each agent is actually built, walks the same real task through all three, and ends with a decision framework based on your constraints, not whichever tool is…