The dirty secret of AI coding right now is that nobody actually knows which tools work best. Is Grok better at coding than Claude Sonnet? Is GitHub Copilot finally good, or does it still deserve its early reputation? The honest answer is that literally nobody has comprehensive real-world data, because no platform runs multiple agents side-by-side and measures their performance on actual work.
This is a huge opening. Instead of betting everything on one model, the right move is to build a platform that orchestrates multiple coding agents and intelligently routes work based on what performs best for specific tasks. Think Twilio for telecommunications — you could go around the world cutting deals with every carrier, or you could integrate with one API that handles global coverage and optimization for you. The carrier choice becomes infrastructure, not a strategic decision the customer should care about.
That is exactly what we are building at Tembo. Run your development work through Claude, GPT, Grok, or any other coding agent, then get reported back on which one actually delivered better results for your specific use case. If there is a model that does the same quality work but costs half as much, wouldn't you want to know? Right now there is no way to know, because every vendor's benchmark is suspiciously favorable to their own model.
The structural reason this opportunity exists is incentive alignment. The big AI companies will build amazing coding agents — but Anthropic will not ship a tool that fairly compares Claude against GPT-4 and routes work to whoever wins. That is not their job. It is the job of a horizontal platform whose only loyalty is to the customer's outcomes.
This is the same logic I worked through in the middleware moment. The lab does not optimize for buyer truth. The platform does. The team that builds the routing layer first wins the next decade of dev tooling.
— Ry
Sources
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Key takeaways
- Nobody has comprehensive real-world data comparing coding agents because nobody runs them side-by-side at scale.
- The Twilio analogy holds — one API, many providers, optimization handled for you.
- A platform that routes work to whichever agent performs best for the task captures value the model labs will not.
FAQ
Why hasn't the market settled on one coding agent?
Because performance varies wildly by task and codebase. Grok might win on Rust refactors, Claude on TypeScript, GPT on SQL. Without a platform running them in parallel, no buyer has the data to know — so they pick one and hope.
Why won't the model labs build this?
Anthropic will not ship a tool that fairly compares Claude to GPT and routes work to whoever performs better. That is the structural opening for a horizontal platform whose incentives align with the buyer rather than any single model provider.