Do coding agents recommend Orb?
Orb was chosen in 16% of 548 judged usage-based billing sessions, ranking second. Measured with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code.
Orb was chosen in 16% of 548 judged usage-based billing sessions, ranking second. It was also raised as a candidate in 389 further sessions without being chosen.
This page reports what happened when Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code had to solve a problem in usage-based billing inside a realistic codebase. Not what a chat assistant says about Orb. What an agent actually installed.
The numbers
| Category | Usage-based billing |
| Sessions in the category | 548 |
| Sessions where Orb was chosen | 88 |
| Install share | 16% |
| Rank in category | 2 of 16 |
| Codebases it won in | 10 |
| Raised as a candidate, not chosen | 389 |
| Chosen when considered | 18% |
| Site | withorb.com |
By agent
Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Muse Code land within 9 points of each other on Orb, which is closer than most products in this experiment manage. Grok Build CLI ran fewer than 30 sessions here, too few to compare.
| Agent | Sessions | Chose Orb | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | 127 | 26 | 20% |
| Codex | 164 | 31 | 19% |
| Cursor | 132 | 15 | 11% |
| Grok Build CLI | 26 | 1 | 4% |
| Muse Code | 99 | 15 | 15% |
By who was asking
Orb does much better with one kind of buyer than another. It won 28% of sessions asked as junior developer and 13% of those asked as enterprise team.
| Who is asking | Sessions | Chose Orb | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Junior developer | 100 | 28 | 28% |
| Senior engineer | 202 | 28 | 14% |
| Enterprise team | 246 | 32 | 13% |
What Orb was up against
The full ranking in usage-based billing, from the same sessions:
| # | Product | Runs won | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Metronome | 225 | 41% |
| 2 | Built in-house (no product adopted) | 107 | 20% |
| 3 | Orb (this page) | 88 | 16% |
| 4 | Lago | 62 | 11% |
| 5 | Stripe Billing | 13 | 2% |
| 6 | CGRateS | 13 | 2% |
| 7 | OpenMeter | 9 | 2% |
| 8 | Oracle BRM | 7 | 1% |
What this means
A solid second or third position in a category means the agent is genuinely choosing rather than reaching automatically. That is a winnable position, because the inputs it uses can be changed.
The fastest gains are usually in the sessions that were nearly won: read them, find the step where the agent moved on, and fix that step.
Where these numbers come from
The 548 sessions in usage-based billing 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 usage-based billing run can be replayed on the board.
If you work on Orb: 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 Orb?
Yes. Orb was chosen in 88 of the 548 judged sessions in usage-based billing, a 16% install share, ranking second in its category.
Does Claude Code recommend Orb?
In 26 of the 127 sessions in usage-based billing run with Claude Code, which is 20%.
Do different coding agents treat Orb differently?
Not much. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Muse Code chose it at similar rates, between 11% and 20% 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.
How often is Orb considered but not chosen?
It was raised as a candidate in 389 sessions without being chosen, and chosen in 88. That is a 18% conversion from considered to chosen.
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.