Tag: comparison

Rule-based checks are your floor and they are non-negotiable; LLM-as-judge is the ceiling you add when code quality, not just correctness, is what you ship. Here is the decision, with cost, latency, and the SWE-bench gap that proves why.

Claude subagents give you orchestration-level parallelism out of the box: one agent spawns isolated sub-contexts that run concurrently. OpenAI Assistants never had that, and it shuts down August 26, 2026, so new parallel work belongs on the Responses API plus your own fan-out. Here is how the two models actually differ and which to reach for.

For a new .NET agent in 2026, start on Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0. Semantic Kernel is in maintenance mode. Here is the side-by-side and the one case where SK still wins.

All three hit 1.0. Pick Microsoft Agent Framework if you live in Azure and .NET, LangChain/LangGraph for vendor-neutral graph orchestration, LlamaIndex for retrieval-grounded agents.

A decision guide and real benchmark for EF Core 11: use ExecuteUpdate for set-based writes by a predicate, and the load-then-SaveChanges path only when you need the change tracker, interceptors, or a complex object graph.

Use custom tool calling for one app you own end to end, MCP for any integration you want reused across Claude Code, Cursor, and ChatGPT, and OpenAPI plugins only as a bridge when you already have a spec. MCP is the cross-client standard in 2026; plugins are legacy.

Pick Riverpod for most new Flutter apps in 2026. Choose Bloc for large teams that want an enforced event-driven structure, and keep Provider only for legacy code.

Pick BackgroundService for in-process loops, raw IHostedService when you need fine lifecycle control, and Hangfire when jobs must survive a restart. A decision matrix with code and the one gotcha that picks for you.

Claude Code wins on raw agent quality and predictable flat pricing, Cursor wins as the editor you live in with the best multi-model routing, and GitHub Copilot wins when the work starts and ends on GitHub. The June 2026 token-billing shift is the tiebreaker for cost.

For a large .NET 11 / C# 14 solution, Claude Code wins on agent quality and runs anywhere a terminal does. Cursor wins if your team wants a GUI and tab completion, as long as you can live without C# Dev Kit. Aider wins on cost and openness.