Claude Code
The terminal-native agent that made agentic coding mainstream — and the reference point every other coding agent is measured against.
Claude Code reads your codebase, runs commands, edits files, and handles git workflows from a terminal session. What matters for deployment work is not the demo but the extension surface: hooks let you run policy checks before a tool call lands, MCP servers connect it to internal systems, and skills encode team conventions. That is what turns a clever assistant into something you can put behind an approval gate. Budget attention for the permission model — an agent with shell access is a production incident waiting for a bad prompt.
Best for: Engineers who want agentic coding inside existing terminal and git workflows