Which AI coding tool do developers actually rate?
The best-rated AI coding tool on Hacker News is Pi, with 84% approval from 423 developer opinions. OpenAI Codex (69%) and OpenCode (66%) follow; the top-rated model for coding is DeepSeek V4 Flash (83%).
Benchmarks measure models in a lab. Reviews are often paid. We read what working developers say about AI coding tools in Hacker News comments, Nov 2025 – Nov 2026, and turned 13,197 opinions into rankings.
AI coding tools
| # | Tool | Type | Approval | Last 90 days | Opinions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pi Open source | Terminal agent | 84% | 80% | 423 |
| 2 | OpenAI Codex OpenAI | Terminal agent | 69% | 63% | 2,013 |
| 3 | OpenCode Open source | Terminal agent | 66% | 55% | 780 |
| 4 | Zed Zed Industries | Editor | 59% | 57% | 457 |
| 5 | Claude Code Anthropic | Terminal agent | 54% | 51% | 3,026 |
| 6 | Cursor Anysphere | AI IDE | 55% | 53% | 766 |
| 7 | Antigravity Google | AI IDE | 45% | 42% | 301 |
| 8 | GitHub Copilot GitHub | IDE extension | 42% | 38% | 659 |
| 9 | Gemini CLI Google | Terminal agent | 29% | 25% | 211 |
Tools with at least 100 opinions, ranked by approval adjusted for sample size.
Most-compared
Models for coding
| # | Model | Approval | Last 90 days | Opinions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | DeepSeek V4 Flash | 83% | 80% | 151 |
| 2 | Claude Opus 4.5 | 78% | 90% | 322 |
| 3 | Claude Opus 5.5 | 75% | 75% | 186 |
| 4 | GLM 5.2 | 75% | 82% | 142 |
| 5 | DeepSeek V4 Pro | 75% | 67% | 121 |
| 6 | GPT-5.4 | 72% | – | 114 |
| 7 | GPT-5.5 | 69% | 67% | 236 |
| 8 | GPT-5.6 Sol | 67% | 66% | 247 |
| 9 | Claude Opus 4.6 | 63% | 63% | 287 |
| 10 | Claude Fable 5 | 57% | 48% | 188 |
| 11 | Claude Opus 4.8 | 49% | 57% | 134 |
| 12 | Claude Opus 4.7 | 42% | – | 145 |
How the ranking works
Each tool is ranked by the share of developer opinions that are positive, adjusted for sample size. Every comment is tagged with the tool it talks about, whether the opinion is positive or negative, whether the author uses the tool, and which topics it covers. Full methodology →
Sources: public comments on Hacker News, collected through the HN Search API by Algolia, Nov 2025 – Nov 2026. Every paraphrased opinion on tool pages links to its original comment.