The Mac-vs-PC Story Playing out in CLI Agents
Recently I became Claude Code-pilled. I had been eagerly trying out the CLI agents from all three major providers: Gemini CLI from Google, Codex CLI from OpenAI, and Claude Code from Anthropic. All the breathless AI influencers turned out to be right: Claude Code is just much, much better than the others.
If you look at the internal architecture of these CLI agents and the resulting full product, you will see the Mac vs PC story playing out all over again.
In most of the major CLI agents today—Codex, Gemini CLI, and Claude Code—these three layers are bundled together into a single, monolithic package. You can’t easily swap out one component for another.
But just like people wanted to build their own PCs out of parts of their choice, we’re now seeing CLI agents that are offering a more mix and match approach. Agents like OpenCode and Crush let you swap in any LLM and also bring modularity to the core system prompts used for agentic behavior. They are innovating at the TUI level and pulling in users with eye-candy UI. They are betting on a modular, mix-and-match strategy.
Anthropic, however, is taking the complete opposite approach with Claude Code. Their strategy is reminiscent of Apple’s: a fully integrated, hermetically-sealed system. You use the Claude model with their proprietary agentic harness and their TUI. It is telling that of the three major CLI agents, it is the only one that is not open-source.
