Every few weeks someone declares a winner among the AI coding agents, usually on the strength of one number: a star count, a download chart or a poll. Here we line up four public sources for the agents in the stak.sh catalog instead: npm downloads, GitHub stars, the Stack Overflow Developer Survey and Hacker News stories. stak.sh already scores tools from all four, as the methodology page explains.
Each source measures something different. npm counts installs and GitHub stars track developer attention. The survey records what people say they use, while Hacker News shows what they talk about. An agent that comes out ahead on all four is probably growing; one that leads on a single source may just suit that source.
npm: Codex grew 38-fold
Most terminal agents ship as npm packages, which makes monthly downloads the nearest thing to an install count. These figures for January and October 2026 come from the public npm downloads API.
| Agent | Package | Jan 2026 | Oct 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI Codex | @openai/codex |
2.33M | 89.39M | ×38 |
| Claude Code | @anthropic-ai/claude-code |
27.58M | 44.03M | ×1.6 |
| Pi | both package names | 1.13M | 19.75M | ×17 |
| OpenCode | opencode-ai |
1.24M | 13.72M | ×11 |
| GitHub Copilot CLI | @github/copilot |
0.48M | 6.16M | ×13 |
| Gemini CLI | @google/gemini-cli |
2.03M | 1.49M | −27% |
| Oh My Pi | @oh-my-pi/pi-coding-agent |
17k | 955k | ×55 |
| Qwen Code | @qwen-code/qwen-code |
166k | 345k | ×2.1 |
| Cline | cline |
276k | 306k | +11% |
| Kilo Code | @kilocode/cli |
42k | 144k | ×3.4 |
| Augment Code | @augmentcode/auggie |
92k | 110k | +20% |
| Amp | @sourcegraph/amp |
138k | 92k | −33% |
| Factory Droid | @factory/cli |
1k | 75k | ×76 |
| Crush | @charmland/crush |
12k | 53k | ×4.4 |
Codex had the biggest year on npm by a wide margin. It overtook Claude Code somewhere between April and July, and by October it was downloaded twice as often. The climb was steady: 31 million in April, 64 million in July, 89 million in October.
Claude Code grew 60 percent and then leveled off. Of January, April, July and October, its best month was July at 49.7 million, and October dropped back to 44 million. Claude Code also has a native installer that bypasses npm, so these numbers miss part of its installs.
Pi changed its package name mid-year, from @mariozechner/pi-coding-agent to @earendil-works/pi-coding-agent. With both names added together it went from 1.1 million to 19.8 million downloads, a 17-fold increase. Oh My Pi, a fork of Pi with extra tools, went from 17,000 to almost a million.
The biggest multiples belong to the smallest packages. Factory’s CLI started the year with under a thousand downloads, so most of its ×76 comes from that low starting point. Gemini CLI and Amp are the only agents with large packages that shrank.
npm counts every download, including CI runs and automatic updates, so an agent that updates itself often gets downloaded more often. The numbers are good for comparing growth over time. They don’t tell you how many people use each agent.
GitHub: OpenCode leads, Grok Build is the fastest newcomer
Star counts only go up, so the more useful figure is stars per month since the repository was created. Counts are from the GitHub API as of 3 November 2026.
| Agent | Repository | Stars | Created | Stars per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenCode | anomalyco/opencode |
224,345 | Apr 2025 | 12,400 |
| Pi | earendil-works/pi |
119,834 | Aug 2025 | 8,100 |
| Claude Code | anthropics/claude-code |
154,423 | Feb 2025 | 7,600 |
| Grok Build | xai-org/grok-build |
27,675 | Jul 2026 | 7,500 |
| OpenAI Codex | openai/codex |
133,008 | Apr 2025 | 7,100 |
| Gemini CLI | google-gemini/gemini-cli |
108,705 | Apr 2025 | 5,900 |
| Oh My Pi | can1357/oh-my-pi |
37,682 | Dec 2025 | 3,700 |
OpenCode has more stars than any other agent in the catalog, and it collected them faster. Pi is second by rate even though its repository is the youngest of the large ones. xAI opened the Grok Build repository in July 2026, and in under four months it has collected 27,000 stars, a slightly faster pace than Codex.
The older open-source agents grew more slowly. OpenHands has 92,590 stars since March 2024, Cline 71,264 since July 2024 and Aider 49,925 since May 2023. A star means a developer was interested at some point, and new projects tend to get the most of that interest. It says little about whether anyone still uses the tool.
Stack Overflow: Claude Code is the most used agent
The 2026 Stack Overflow Developer Survey asked developers which AI coding agents they use. Shares are of the developers who answered that question.
| Agent | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Claude Code | 65.5% |
| GitHub Copilot | 58.7% |
| OpenAI Codex | 29.5% |
| Cursor | 14.9% |
| OpenCode | 13.6% |
| Windsurf | 6.5% |
| Cline | 4.5% |
| Pi | 4.4% |
| Continue | 3.8% |
| Aider | 2.1% |
| Tabnine | 2.1% |
The survey is the only one of the four sources that asks people directly, and its ranking looks quite different from npm’s. Two in three respondents use Claude Code, more than twice the share for Codex, even though Codex now gets twice the npm downloads. Claude Code’s native installer explains part of that gap. Timing explains some more: the survey is a once-a-year snapshot, and most of Codex’s npm growth came in the second half of the year.
The survey’s questions change from one edition to the next, so we haven’t compared these shares with earlier years.
Hacker News: less talk overall, more about newcomers
Hacker News is where many developers first hear about and argue over new tools. These are counts of stories mentioning each agent in the first four months of 2026 and in July to October, from the HN Algolia search API.
| Agent | Jan–Apr 2026 | Jul–Oct 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | 3,439 | 1,544 |
| OpenCode | 286 | 241 |
| OpenAI Codex | 172 | 75 |
| Gemini CLI | 146 | 19 |
| Pi | 34 | 34 |
| Grok Build | 1 | 29 |
| Oh My Pi | 2 | 26 |
| Aider | 24 | 6 |
Mentions fell for almost every agent, including the ones whose downloads grew. Claude Code still shows up in more stories than all the others combined, though about half as often as in the spring. Only the two newest agents, Grok Build and Oh My Pi, appear in clearly more stories in the second half.
Copilot, Cline, Crush, Kiro, Devin and Windsurf are missing from this table because their names are common words or names, and a search for them turns up too many stories about something else.
What the four sources agree on
Codex grew its installs more than any other agent, 38-fold on npm, and is now the third most used agent in the survey, behind Claude Code and GitHub Copilot. Pi and its fork Oh My Pi grew quickly on npm and on GitHub, and Oh My Pi picked up on Hacker News as well. OpenCode grew 11-fold on npm, has the most GitHub stars, and 13.6 percent of survey respondents use it.
Claude Code is still the most used and most discussed agent, but on npm it grew more slowly than any other large agent apart from Gemini CLI. Gemini CLI is the one large agent that shrank, both on npm and on Hacker News.
The AI coding agent scores on stak.sh combine these and other sources into one score per agent.