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Which Coding Harness Are Developers Actually Using? A Top-5 Community and Token-Traffic Snapshot (Sep 2026)

Research date: 2026-09-05. This is a dated popularity snapshot, not a capability benchmark. "Traffic" here means tokens routed through OpenRouter's publicly tracked app pages by apps that opted into attribution; community signals are GitHub stars, marketplace/npm install data, and representative discussion sources. By request, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and Codex CLI are excluded from the ranking but kept in tables where they are useful as scale references.

Companion context: LLM provider usage & traffic ranking (Sep 2026) covers the model/provider side of the same question, and Coding Agent CLIs: benchmarks and harness differences covers why the harness layer matters.

TL;DR

  • Hermes Agent is the top harness by actual routed token volume and by GitHub stars in this pool. On the Sep 5 OpenRouter snapshot it is the #1 coding app by daily tokens (1.58T/day) and the #1 app on the platform's app rankings, with ~51T tokens on its app card. Caveat: Hermes is a general persistent agent, not a coding-only product; a large share of its volume is broader agent work.
  • Kilo Code is the top coding-only BYO-key harness among the excluded vendor CLIs' peers: 447B tokens/day on the coding category, ~9.94T on its app card, and 1.5M VS Code installs.
  • Cline has the largest installed open-source editor base (5.2M VS Code installs, 4.1/5 rating) but trails Kilo Code in OpenRouter coding traffic.
  • Pi is the strongest terminal-native community (102k GitHub stars, 2.65M npm downloads in the last tracked week) and is frequently praised in same-model harness comparisons for efficiency.
  • omp / Oh My Pi is the fastest riser in the traffic table — active on OpenRouter only since May 2026 yet already #7 among coding apps by tokens.
  • DeepSeek Harness and OpenCode are the two big "community-first" outliers: 212k and 204k GitHub stars respectively, with little or no OpenRouter app-page presence, so their actual runtime usage is harder to observe with public data.

1. Why traffic is the strongest "people actually voting" signal here

The two cheapest ways to look popular are GitHub stars and newsletter/blog mentions. The two least-cheatable signals for an agent harness are paid runtime tokens and extension/npm installs. OpenRouter is the largest neutral router that publishes per-app usage for tools that opt into tracking (OpenRouter app rankings, captured 2026-09-05).

This snapshot uses three kinds of evidence:

Signal What it shows Blind spots
OpenRouter app tokens Which harnesses developers actually run with BYO API keys Only opt-in app traffic; first-party providers and subscriptions are invisible
GitHub stars / forks Interest and "save for later" behavior Star campaigns and media spikes inflate counts; stars are not usage
VS Code installs / npm downloads Installed base and distribution churn Includes CI/auto-update traffic; VS Code installs exclude non-editor users
Marketplace ratings / forum & HN discussion Quality perception and controversy Small sample sizes; vocal minorities

The ranking below starts from the OpenRouter Coding Agents category and then cross-checks each candidate against community evidence. The app pages' "Total tokens" card is the rolling figure OpenRouter shows with its "Last 30 days" usage chart; treat it as a snapshot, not an audited market share.

2. OpenRouter token traffic, Sep 5, 2026

The daily figures below are the Sep 5 values shown on OpenRouter's coding-agent category page (Coding Agents Rankings). App-card totals are from each app's OpenRouter detail page. The excluded tools are shown only as scale references.

OpenRouter coding rank App Daily tokens (Sep 5) App-card tokens Global daily rank
1 Hermes Agent (Nous Research) 1.58T ~51T #1
2 Claude Code (excluded) 769B ~15.6T #2
3 Kilo Code 447B ~9.94T #3
4 Cline 375B ~8.15T #4
5 Codex (excluded) 272B ~2.93T #5
6 pi 270B ~5.93T #6
7 omp (omp.sh / Oh My Pi) 204B ~4.75T #8
8 OpenClaw 173B ~4.81T #9
9 Portkey AI 49.7B — —
10 ZCode 46B — —
12 Cursor 32B — —
13 OpenHands 26.2B — —
21 Roo Code 8.8B — —
22 goose 7.91B — —
23 Qwen Code 6.86B — —

Reading the table:

  • After excluding Claude Code and Codex, the token-traffic top 5 is: Hermes Agent, Kilo Code, Cline, pi, and omp.
  • OpenCode, DeepSeek Harness, Aider, and most other notable open-source harnesses do not appear as tracked apps. OpenCode and DeepSeek Harness largely run on direct API keys, their own gateways, or OpenRouter without app-level attribution; the ofox/dev.to harness roundup explicitly notes that OpenCode has no entry in this dataset (dev.to, Aug 2026).
  • Cursor routes only ~32B/day through OpenRouter because most of its inference runs on subscription-model behind Cursor's own product; its absence from the top five is an artifact of measurement, not evidence that nobody uses it.

3. Community and installed-base evidence

GitHub star counts were pulled from the GitHub API on Sep 5, 2026. VS Code install counts and marketplace ratings are from the marketplace pages captured the same day. npm counts are the last complete week returned by the npm registry at capture (Aug 23–29, 2026).

Harness GitHub repo Stars (Sep 5) Installs / downloads Community signal
Hermes Agent NousResearch/hermes-agent ~241.4k not published #1 global OpenRouter app; 457 models on its app page; also #1 in Productivity category
DeepSeek Harness deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness ~212.2k @deepseek-ai/dsh ~367k/wk 747-point HN launch thread (HN 49285244); fastest large star run of the cohort
OpenCode anomalyco/opencode ~204.0k opencode-ai ~2.9M/wk No OpenRouter app page; large terminal/desktop/IDE distribution
pi earendil-works/pi ~101.8k @earendil-works/pi-coding-agent ~2.65M/wk Terminal-native "minimal harness"; frequent same-model bake-off leader
OpenHands OpenHands/OpenHands ~86.2k — Long-lived agent platform
Cline cline/cline ~67.5k Cline VS Code extension ~5.21M installs, 4.1/5 Largest editor install base of the open-source group
goose aaif-goose/goose ~53.9k — Linux Foundation–housed agent framework
Aider Aider-AI/aider ~48.7k — Longest-running OSS terminal pair programmer
omp / Oh My Pi can1357/oh-my-pi ~29.5k @oh-my-pi/pi-coding-agent ~114k/wk Fork of pi with LSP/DAP and editor integration; HN attention (item 48994611)
Kilo Code Kilo-Org/kilocode ~27.2k Kilo Code VS Code extension ~1.5M installs, 3.8/5; @kilocode/cli ~43k/wk Highest coding-only OpenRouter volume, but smaller star base and visible v7-rewrite backlash

Three observations:

  1. Stars disagree sharply with traffic. Kilo Code has less than half of Cline's GitHub stars but more OpenRouter coding tokens. That gap is the difference between "people bookmarked it" and "people route paid inference through it."
  2. npm download volume is noisy but directional. opencode-ai and @earendil-works/pi-coding-agent each show ~2.9M and ~2.65M weekly downloads, and @deepseek-ai/dsh passed 1.45M tracked downloads in its first three weeks (npm registry data through Sep 2). These numbers include auto-update and mirror traffic, but they confirm real distribution reach.
  3. DeepSeek Harness and OpenCode are sentiment leaders without public OpenRouter app attribution. Anyone ranking purely by GitHub stars would put both above Kilo Code and Cline; anyone ranking purely by OpenRouter coding traffic would barely see them. Both claims are true, and both datasets see different populations.

4. The top five, compared

1. Hermes Agent — the volume + community double winner

Hermes Agent leads the OpenRouter app rankings across coding, productivity, and CLI-agent categories, with 1.58T daily tokens and ~51T on its app card as of Sep 5. It also has the largest GitHub star count in this pool (~241k) and the most model diversity in the table (457 models). It is open source and self-improving, which explains both its fan base and its criticism — some observers attribute part of the growth to aggressive promotion rather than code quality (WebProNews, Jun 2026). For a coding-only question, treat its volume as an upper bound: much of it is autonomous general-agent work, not pure repository editing.

2. Kilo Code — the coding-only BYO-key leader

Among tools whose primary job is coding, Kilo Code is the top harness on OpenRouter's tracked traffic: 447B daily tokens and ~9.94T on its app card, ahead of its own VS Code install count (1.5M). Its distribution story is editor-first (VS Code/JetBrains plus a CLI), and its strongest public signal is the cheap-model, BYO-key workflow. Its community grade is more mixed: the v7 rewrite drew complaints from users who preferred the older UX, and the marketplace rating (3.8/5) trails Cline's.

3. Cline — largest installed editor base

Cline is the original VS Code autonomous-coding agent in this group, with 5.21M VS Code installs and 67.5k GitHub stars. Its OpenRouter coding volume (375B/day) is behind Kilo's, which is notable because Cline has more than 3x the installs. Possible explanations include a higher share of direct provider keys, older/less-token-hungry workflows, and Kilo's aggressive multi-model positioning. Cline's 4.1/5 marketplace rating is the best of the editor-native pair.

4. pi — the terminal-native community favorite

Pi is the deliberately minimal harness by Mario Zechner: 102k stars, 2.65M weekly npm downloads, and ~5.93T OpenRouter app tokens. Its community is unusually vocal about the harness layer itself, and it keeps appearing at the top of same-model community comparisons because its loop is cheap to run (e.g., the Pi-leads harness run reported by The BlockBeats, Aug 2026). It ships few features by design; "Ask Pi to build it" is the documented workflow.

5. omp / Oh My Pi — the fastest traffic riser

omp is Pi's IDE-wired fork (repo can1357/oh-my-pi, site omp.sh). It has been active on OpenRouter only since May 2026 but already carries ~4.75T app tokens and ~204B/day, ranking #7 in OpenRouter's coding category. It combines Pi's terminal model with LSP, debugging, and editor-integration features that many terminal users were asking for, and its community is younger and smaller (~29.5k stars) than the rest of the top five.

5. What would a different weighting produce?

Every ranking is a policy choice. Here is how the top five changes when the metric changes:

If you weight most heavily by... Top five looks like
Public routed coding tokens (OpenRouter) Hermes Agent, Kilo Code, Cline, pi, omp
GitHub stars + forum attention Hermes Agent, DeepSeek Harness, OpenCode, pi, Cline
VS Code installed base Cline, Kilo Code, then a long tail
npm distribution reach OpenCode, pi, DeepSeek Harness, omp, Kilo Code
Same-model harness efficiency tests pi / DeepSeek Harness / Claude Code / Codex / OpenCode cluster — quality spreads are much smaller than cost spreads

The Sep 5 bottom line: if the question is "what is actually running right now," the answer is Hermes Agent first, Kilo Code first among coding-only harnesses, and DeepSeek Harness the strongest sentiment-only challenger.

Caveats

  • OpenRouter app rankings count only apps that opt into public usage attribution. Claude Code and Codex figures on OpenRouter understate their real traffic because most runs use first-party subscriptions/APIs; the same is true for DeepSeek Harness, OpenCode, Cursor, and any product on direct vendor inference.
  • App-card "Total tokens" figures are rolling values displayed by OpenRouter with a "Last 30 days" chart and are not independently audited.
  • GitHub stars and npm downloads are attention/distribution signals, not MAU or token counts. npm numbers include auto-update and CI traffic.
  • Marketplace ratings are small-sample review pools (205–312 ratings for the two editor extensions above).
  • The harness field is moving on a weekly basis. Numbers dated Sep 5 may be stale by the next release cycle.

Primary sources