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Serverless functions: which platforms coding agents choose

AWS Lambda took about 24% of runs, Vercel Functions about 23%.

287 runs8 apps3 agents4 personasupdated 2026-09-02

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Key learnings

We asked three coding agents to add serverless functions to eight small apps. That ran 287 times, worded several ways and asked as four kinds of user. Under the two leaders the picks scattered, and 50 times the agents wrote the functions themselves.

36 of 72

Who was asking moved the answer

For enterprise teams the pick was Azure Functions, 36 times out of 72 runs. Vibe coders got Cloudflare Workers most often. Junior developers got Vercel Functions in 34 of their 72 runs.

16 of 24

Wording alone changed most answers

Each agent got the same job on the same app more than once, in different words. In 16 of those 24 groups of runs, the answer wasn't always the same platform.

49 of 96

One agent went to Lambda far more

Codex picked AWS Lambda in 49 of its 96 runs. Cursor and Claude Code both put Vercel Functions on top instead.

1 of 91

Named in many runs, chosen in one

Netlify Functions came up in 91 runs and was picked once.

  • The simulated user approved every plan, but sent the agent back at least once in 29 runs.
  • In nine runs it refused to approve until the agent named a specific platform.
  • All five wins for Render came in one helpdesk billing starter codebase.
  • All four wins for Fly.io came in a Remix workshop bookings app.
  • Google Cloud Run won 11 runs, ahead of the rest of the smaller platforms.
Explore every run in the interactive board

The ranking287 runs

ProductWinsShare
1 AWS Lambdaaws.amazon.com 70 24%
2 Vercel Functionsvercel.com 65 23%
3 Built in-houseoutcome 50 17%
4 Azure Functionsazure.microsoft.com 36 13%
5 Cloudflare Workersworkers.cloudflare.com 20 7%
6 Google Cloud Runcloud.google.com 11 4%
7 Inngestinngest.com 7 2%
8 Renderrender.com 5 2%
9 Fly.iofly.io 4 1%
10 Google Cloud Functionscloud.google.com 2 1%
11 Inngest + Vercel Functions 1 0%
12 Trigger.devtrigger.dev 1 0%
13 Upstash QStashupstash.com 1 0%
14 Netlify Functionsnetlify.com 1 0%

By agent, by persona, by wording

By agent

Codex · GPT-5.6 Sol96 runsAWS Lambda · 49then Vercel Functions · 20
Claude Code · Claude Opus 596 runsVercel Functions · 24then Azure Functions · 12
Cursor · Grok 4.695 runsVercel Functions · 21then AWS Lambda · 18

By persona

Senior engineer107 runsAWS Lambda · 36then Vercel Functions · 31
Enterprise team72 runsAzure Functions · 36then AWS Lambda · 21
Junior developer72 runsVercel Functions · 34then AWS Lambda · 10
Vibe coder36 runsCloudflare Workers · 15then Fly.io · 4

By what the ask stressed

The plain ask287 runsAWS Lambda · 70then Vercel Functions · 65

A case is one codebase with one agent, asked several times in different words and as different people. 16 of 24 cases did not hold to a single platform.

How this was measured

Every number on this page comes from a controlled experiment. We took 8 small applications, asked 3 coding agents (Codex (GPT-5.6 Sol), Claude Code (Claude Opus 5), Cursor (Grok 4.6)) to add serverless functions to each of them, in several wordings and as a senior engineer and enterprise team and junior developer and vibe coder, and let the agent choose the product. Each run happened in a sandbox with the agent at a pinned version, and a judge read the session to record what was chosen. That is 287 runs. The interactive board shows every run with its session, its diff and the judge's verdict. A simulated user stood in for the owner of the codebase: it read the agent's plan and had to approve it before any code was written; it sent the agent back at least once in 29 runs. Read the methodology and the publications.

If you sell in this sector: what these numbers mean for a vendor.

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