At a glance
A Claude-centric coding agent with interactive and non-interactive workflows, explicit permissions, native sandboxing, MCP, skills, hooks, plugins, delegated agents, background sessions, and subscription or API authentication.
Good choice if
- Developers already paying for Claude Pro or Max
- Interactive and delegated work on large repositories
- Teams that want hooks, MCP, subagents, and explicit permission modes
Check before choosing
- The local CLI is host-first: OS sandboxing is disabled by default, may fall back to unsandboxed execution when unavailable unless failIfUnavailable is enabled, and covers Bash subprocesses rather than every tool
- Worktrees isolate file edits rather than processes; browser control runs in the user's real Chrome profile and can access authenticated sites
- Checkpoint rewind omits Bash-created file changes and remote side effects; agent teams and agent view are research previews, and parallel background sessions consume subscription quota independently
See 9 more considerations
- Server-managed settings are not fail-closed on an uncached first launch unless forceRemoteSettingsRefresh is explicitly enabled
- Hosted model access is Claude-only, local open-weight models are unsupported, and Chrome integration requires a direct Anthropic plan
- Managed Code Review is a separate Team and Enterprise GitHub surface whose neutral check does not block merges unless users add their own CI gate
- Plugin marketplaces can install agents, hooks, MCP and LSP servers; organizations must configure marketplace allowlists when arbitrary sources are not acceptable
- The optional unattended retry watchdog can retry capacity errors indefinitely and other transient failures for roughly three hours, so CI owners still need explicit time and spend boundaries
- Auto mode is classifier-backed rather than a sandbox: Anthropic's published evaluation reports a 17% false-negative rate on 52 real overeager actions and says it is not a replacement for careful review in high-stakes workflows
- Zero Data Retention is a separately enabled option for qualifying Enterprise API organizations and excludes web and Cloud sessions, Remote Control, feedback, third-party tools, and MCP integrations
- The public GitHub repository exposes releases, plugins, examples, and issue automation rather than the proprietary core implementation or product test suite
- Self-hosted runners execute web, mobile, or desktop sessions on user-managed machines or containers rather than adding a managed isolation boundary; cross-session messaging and held approvals still depend on the configured account, organization, and host controls