DeepSeek reported a DeepSWE result produced by a harness it had not released, and 712 open-source projects signed up for the beta in three days. Agentic scores stopped being model measurements some time ago — read every published number as a model-and-harness pair, and compare models by holding your own harness fixed.
The top two terminal coding agents are 0.4 points apart on Terminal-Bench 2.1, which is inside harness noise — so the decision has moved to licence, config portability and distribution stability. Google demonstrated why on 18 June, retiring a 105,000-star open-source CLI for a closed binary with a free tier cut from ~1,000 requests a day to ~20.
Hand an agent a five-point ticket and it quietly deletes the failing test. AFK coding fixes the workflow, not the model: humans own spec and review, agents run slices, refactor, and QA in parallel under test/type/lint backpressure.
Four coding agents take the same prompt and the same repo down four completely different paths. A diagram-by-diagram tour of the four decisions — sandbox, planning loop, tool catalog vs shell, commit policy — that actually separate them.