Another Route Through While Models Eat Everything

In February 2025, Anthropic released Claude Code. In April, OpenAI shipped Codex CLI. In June, Google launched Gemini CLI. Within four months three model vendors each built a command-line coding tool, in a space that until then had belonged to a group of startups. What followed went beyond product competition. From January 9, 2026, Anthropic began blocking third-party tools on the server side from reaching Claude subscriptions through OAuth, and on February 20 it updated its terms to state that OAuth tokens may be used only in Claude Code and Claude.ai (The Register, February 20, 2026). In May, Google announced it would cut off the Gemini CLI backend for free and individual users, effective June 18 (The Register, May 20, 2026). The Apache 2.0 license did not change. What was shut off was the API. The successor, Antigravity CLI, is closed source. Gemini CLI then had 100,000 stars and more than 6,000 merged external PRs (TechTimes, May 23, 2026). The Register's coverage carried one line of judgment: without API access, the codebase is an archive. A group of application-layer players dropped out around the same time. Sourcegraph's Cody shut its free and individual paid tiers in July 2025. Windsurf was split in two that month, with the team taken by Google and the remaining company bought by Cognition. Roo Code archived its repository on May 15, 2026, when it had about 3 million installs. Continue was acquired and wound down by Cursor in June, its repository turned read-only, and Cursor itself was folded into a larger entity that same month. These events can be read in two directions. One is model capability moving up: each time a model gets stronger, some of the engineering built around it is no longer needed. The other is vendors moving down: model companies build applications themselves and use terms and API permissions to decide who can reach their users. Both squeeze the same space. In those same four months, one company went from zero to 13 million monthly active users. OpenCode's three steps OpenCode, an open-source coding agent, launched on June 19, 2025. According to figures disclosed on YC's Lightcone podcast (with founder Jay V, July 2026) and relayed by Digg, it now has 4.6 million weekly active users, 13 million monthly active users, about $40 million in annualized revenue, and handles 7 trillion tokens a day. YC's Jared Friedman said the token volume exceeds all of OpenRouter. That can be cross-checked: OpenRouter handled 25 trillion tokens a week in May 2026 (TechCrunch, May 26, 2026), about 3.6 trillion a day. It trains no models, holds no weights, and has no exclusive license from any model vendor. Most of the companies on the list of dropouts above started earlier and had more resources. What it does breaks into three steps: win users with open source, sell service packages on top of those users, and put itself in the position of distributing models. I'll take them one at a time. Which costs open source lowers Open source is a common way to win users among developer tools. In the coding agent category it removes a few costs more concretely than elsewhere. One is procurement friction. A command-line tool is cheap to install anyway, and once it is open source nobody needs to request a budget or wait for legal to approve a contract. One is the cost of review. This kind of tool reads all the source, runs shell and git, and holds more permissions than a typical developer tool. At that level of permission, whether the code can be audited directly affects whether an enterprise can use it. One more concerns model lock-in. Installing OpenCode does not require committing to any one model. Users can bring an API key, bring a subscription, or connect a private deployment. By contrast, installing Claude Code means using only Claude and installing Gemini CLI means using only Gemini, and after Gemini CLI was cut off for individual users in June 2026 even that premise no longer held. No public data splits out how much each of these saves. What can be seen is the result: OpenCode once gained 18,000 stars in two weeks in January 2026 and reached tens of millions of monthly users in a year. The same product shape existed before. Aider put together the combination of terminal first, git native, and model neutral as early as June 2023, twenty months before Claude Code, with about 4.9 million pip installs in total. It has now gone nearly a year without a release, the community is asking in an issue whether it has entered maintenance mode, and the author, Paul Gauthier, replied with one line saying he is busy with other projects for now. The two have similar shapes and sizable install bases. One clear difference is that Aider never had a source of revenue, and its author was never full-time on it. Whether that is why it stopped updating, he hasn't said. Three paid lines running at once