The Spectrum

Agent tools fall on a spectrum from interactive to autonomous:

Interactive pair programmer
  Claude Code, Codex CLI, Aider, Goose, opencode, Gemini CLI, crush
        |
  Hermes Agent (interactive + scheduled + messaging gateways)
        |
Autonomous issue fixer
  SWE-agent, Devin, claude -p in CI
        |
Multi-agent framework (build your own)
  CrewAI, LangGraph, AutoGen/MAF, MetaGPT
        |
Agent orchestrator (manage a fleet)
  Symphony (issue → run), Paperclip (goal → org chart)

Interactive agents: you stay in the loop, approve actions, redirect the agent. Best for daily coding, debugging, and exploratory work where requirements shift.

Autonomous agents: you assign a task and come back to a result. Best for well-specified, bounded tasks: fix this bug, implement this spec, review this PR. The quality of the task description determines the quality of the output more than the agent choice.

Multi-agent frameworks: libraries for building custom agent systems. Not coding tools themselves. You use LangGraph to build an agent, not to write code.

Harness optimizers and meta-harnesses: systems that modify a target harness and compare candidate versions. They are not another terminal coding-agent category. ADAS, AFlow, Meta-Harness, and Agentic Harness Engineering operate at this outer loop. Compare them through the Landscape research layer, not by placing them beside Claude Code or Codex in a runtime feature table.