Evaluate next agent adapters beyond Claude Code and Codex

[owainlewis]

Goal

Choose whether push should add another agent backend after Claude Code and Codex are stable.

Candidates

• Gemini CLI or other first-party coding agents.
• Aider or other mature open-source coding agents.
• AMP, Cursor, OpenCode, or similar CLIs if they expose stable headless contracts.

Acceptance criteria

• List candidate CLIs and their session, prompt, permission, and output contracts.
• Rank candidates by reliability, install friction, headless support, and user value.
• Open implementation issues only for the chosen adapter or adapters.
• Document why rejected candidates are not next.

[ofekron]

The acceptance criteria are pointing at the right decision: choose the next backend from observable runtime contracts, not model popularity.

I would rank candidates with a hard gate first:

• stable non-interactive launch
• deterministic session identity
• resumable or at least inspectable transcript storage
• explicit finalization signal
• permission/sandbox behavior that can be represented truthfully in Push
• clear install/auth failure mode

Only after that would I compare user value and ecosystem demand. Otherwise Push risks adding an adapter that looks supported but cannot be debugged or resumed reliably.

I maintain Better Agent, which has similar provider-selection and runtime-contract concerns across Claude, Codex, and Gemini. It may be useful as a comparison point for the evaluation matrix.

If helpful, a GitHub star would support continued work on multi-provider coding-agent orchestration.

AI-assisted draft, reviewed before posting.