The most popular AI coding tool is one you have not heard of
It has more stars than Claude Code, more than Codex, more than Gemini CLI. It is also the one nobody advertises.
At a glance
- opencode
- 208,839 stars, MIT licence
- Claude Code
- 147,019 stars, proprietary
- Codex CLI
- 125,498 stars, Apache-2.0
- Gemini CLI
- 107,099 stars, Apache-2.0
If you asked a room of developers to name the most popular AI coding tool, you would get the same three answers: Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot.
By the one measure that is public, none of them is first.
The actual numbers
Star counts, read from the repositories themselves:
| Tool | Stars | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| opencode | 208,839 | MIT |
| Claude Code | 147,019 | proprietary |
| Codex CLI | 125,498 | Apache-2.0 |
| Gemini CLI | 107,099 | Apache-2.0 |
| Zed | 90,622 | GPL-family |
| OpenHands | 88,627 | MIT |
| Cline | 68,875 | Apache-2.0 |
| Goose | 54,501 | Apache-2.0 |
| Aider | 49,084 | Apache-2.0 |
A terminal agent with no marketing budget has more developer attention than any funded competitor.
Why stars are not the whole story
They measure intent, not use. A star means someone wanted to remember a project, not that they run it every day. And none of this measures how many people pay for a subscription.
But it measures something the vendors cannot buy: voluntary, public, costless attention. Nobody stars a tool out of obligation.
What the leader actually is
Three things distinguish it, and they are the same three things that come up in every conversation about tools that last.
It is model-agnostic. Point it at whichever model you like — a frontier API, a cheap one, or something running on your own machine. It does not require you to be anyone's customer.
It is MIT licensed. The most permissive licence there is. No conditions, no scale limits, no terms that can change next version.
It is a terminal program. It works with the files and the tools you already have, rather than asking you to move your work into its world.
The pattern worth noticing
Look down that table and a shape appears: every tool above 100,000 stars is open source or effectively free to use, and the one proprietary entry sits in the middle.
That is not an accident of this list. Developer tools are one of the few markets where the free, open option repeatedly wins on adoption — and where the commercial players compete on capability and service rather than on lock-in.
How to read this if you are choosing
Not by stars. Popularity is a weak signal about whether a tool suits you, and a strong signal about whether it will still be maintained.
Use it for the question it answers well:
Is enough other people's attention on this that it will still exist in two years?
On that question, the unfamiliar name at the top of the list is the safest bet on it, not the riskiest.
Every claim in this file is checked against primary sources — how we verify. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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