From the experiment

Do coding agents recommend Nominatim?

Coding agents raised Nominatim in 172 of 759 judged maps sessions and chose it alone in none of them, and only as part of a joint choice in 6.

Published September 28, 2026 Updated September 29, 2026 Read as Markdown

Coding agents raised Nominatim in 172 of 759 judged maps sessions and chose it alone in none of them, and only as part of a joint choice in 6.

This page reports what happened when Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code had to solve a problem in maps inside a realistic codebase. Not what a chat assistant says about Nominatim. What an agent actually installed.

The numbers

CategoryMaps
Sessions in the category759
Sessions where Nominatim was chosen0
Install share0%
Raised as a candidate, not chosen172
Chosen when considered0%
Sitenominatim.org

Which agents raised Nominatim

Every agent considered it and none chose it alone. Cursor raised it most often, in 36% of its maps sessions.

AgentSessionsRaised NominatimChose it alone
Claude Code16439 (24%)0
Codex22721 (9%)0
Cursor15456 (36%)0
Grok Build CLI3712 (32%)0
Muse Code17744 (25%)0

Which buyers it came up for

It surfaced most for requests written as junior developer, in 32% of those sessions. Knowing which buyer already has the product in mind tells you which pages to fix first.

Who is askingSessionsRaised it
Vibe coder1638 (5%)
Junior developer24778 (32%)
Senior engineer16234 (21%)
Enterprise team18752 (28%)

What Nominatim was up against

The full ranking in maps, from the same sessions:

#ProductRuns wonShare
1Google Maps13318%
2Leaflet12516%
3Apple Maps (MapKit)10414%
4MapLibre618%
5Mapbox527%
6Built in-house (no product adopted)436%
7react-native-maps375%
8OpenStreetMap375%

What this means

Raised 172 times and never chosen alone is a specific, diagnosable result, and a better starting position than being unknown. The agent has the product in mind. It reached the shortlist 172 times and made it into 6 joint choices, but never into a choice of its own.

In our data the causes, in the order they occur:

  • The quickstart does not run when pasted, so the agent abandoned it mid-integration.
  • The documentation describes an interface that changed, so the generated code failed.
  • The product name and the package name differ, so the install step went wrong.
  • The fit was genuinely wrong for the repository, which is fine and worth knowing.

All but the last are fixable in days, and the reason is written down in the session transcript.

Where these numbers come from

The 759 sessions in maps are part of a published set of 15,051, run with real coding agents inside realistic codebases and judged blind. The full method is on one page: how we measured this.

Every maps run can be replayed on the board.

If you work on Nominatim: the judge recorded a reason for every session where it was raised and passed over. Those reasons are in the transcripts.

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Common questions

Do coding agents recommend Nominatim?

They raise it but rarely choose it. Across 172 sessions where Nominatim came up as a candidate, agents never chose it alone; it was part of a joint choice in 6.

Does Claude Code recommend Nominatim?

In 0 of the 164 sessions in maps run with Claude Code, which is 0%.

Do different coding agents treat Nominatim differently?

Not much. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code chose it at similar rates, between 0% and 0% of their runs.

How was this measured?

Real coding agents at pinned versions were run in sandboxes inside 92 realistic codebases and asked to solve real tasks. A simulated project owner approved or questioned each recommendation before any code was written, and a judge from a model family that builds none of the agents read every session blind.

Where this comes from

Armature ran 15,051 judged sessions with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code inside 92 realistic codebases, and published every run. The numbers on this page come from that work.

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