From the experiment

Do coding agents recommend PaddleOCR?

Coding agents raised PaddleOCR in 79 of 623 judged document processing sessions and chose it in none of them.

Published September 23, 2026 Read as Markdown

Coding agents raised PaddleOCR in 79 of 623 judged document processing sessions and chose it in none of them.

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

The numbers

CategoryDocument processing
Sessions in the category623
Sessions where PaddleOCR was chosen0
Install share0%
Raised as a candidate, not chosen79
Chosen when considered0%
Sitepaddleocr.ai

Which agents raised PaddleOCR

Every agent considered it and none adopted it. Claude Code raised it most often, in 18% of its document processing sessions.

AgentSessionsRaised PaddleOCRChose it
Claude Code18032 (18%)0
Codex17521 (12%)0
Cursor18019 (11%)0
Grok Build CLI303 (10%)0
Muse Code584 (7%)0

Which buyers it came up for

It surfaced most for requests written as junior developer, in 16% of those sessions. Knowing which buyer already has the product in mind tells you which pages to fix first.

Who is askingSessionsRaised it
Vibe coder531 (2%)
Junior developer26744 (16%)
Senior engineer21122 (10%)
Enterprise team9212 (13%)

What PaddleOCR was up against

The full ranking in document processing, from the same sessions:

#ProductRuns wonShare
1Anthropic Claude13622%
2Azure AI Document Intelligence13622%
3Amazon Textract7712%
4Google Cloud Document AI447%
5Google Gemini396%
6OpenAI models224%
7Ocrolus193%
8Apache PDFBox183%

What this means

Raised 79 times and chosen none is a specific, diagnosable result, and a better starting position than being unknown. The agent has the product in mind. It reached the shortlist 79 times. Something then lost every one of those sessions.

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 623 sessions in document processing are part of a published set of 11,878, run with real coding agents inside realistic codebases and judged blind. The full method is on one page: how we measured this.

Every document processing run can be replayed on the board.

If you work on PaddleOCR: 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 PaddleOCR?

They raise it but do not choose it. Across 79 sessions where PaddleOCR came up as a candidate, agents chose something else every time.

Does Claude Code recommend PaddleOCR?

In 0 of the 180 sessions in document processing run with Claude Code, which is 0%.

Do different coding agents treat PaddleOCR 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 91 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 11,878 judged sessions with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code inside 91 realistic codebases, and published every run. The numbers on this page come from that work.

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