Choosing agent tooling
Two pieces. The first sorts the market into categories and says who each suits. The second gives you three questions to narrow it down.
| Piece | Answers |
|---|---|
| Platform categories | Cloud orchestration, local CLI, desktop aggregation — and the symptoms of picking wrong |
| Four command-line agents | Claude Code / Codex / Hermes / OpenClaw — origin, strengths, requirements |
| How to choose | Three questions: does it touch your machine, how often, can the data leave |
The short version
If you're a developer who wants a tool acting directly on your machine, you're in the local CLI category. Which one you pick depends mostly on whether your work is code-heavy or general.
If you already run more than one CLI agent and window-switching has become the annoyance, the problem is aggregation, not choosing another agent — see how Aiglade handles that layer.
If you don't need local files touched and just want a fixed process across several systems, cloud orchestration fits, with nothing to install.