From the experiment

Do coding agents recommend Prometheus?

Coding agents raised Prometheus in 139 of 360 judged observability sessions and chose it in none of them. Measured with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.

Published September 3, 2026 Read as Markdown

Coding agents raised Prometheus in 139 of 360 judged observability sessions and chose it in none of them.

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

The numbers

CategoryObservability
Sessions in the category360
Sessions where Prometheus was chosen0
Install share0%
Raised as a candidate, not chosen139
Chosen when considered0%
Siteprometheus.io

Which agents raised Prometheus

Every agent considered it and none adopted it. Cursor raised it most often, in 55% of its observability sessions.

AgentSessionsRaised PrometheusChose it
Claude Code12050 (42%)0
Codex12023 (19%)0
Cursor12066 (55%)0

Which buyers it came up for

It surfaced most for requests written as enterprise team, in 89% of those sessions. Knowing which buyer already has the product in mind tells you which pages to fix first.

Who is askingSessionsRaised it
Vibe coder121 (8%)
Junior developer123 (25%)
Senior engineer300103 (34%)
Enterprise team3632 (89%)

What Prometheus was up against

The full ranking in observability, from the same sessions:

#ProductRuns wonShare
1Sentry13337%
2Grafana5214%
3Amazon CloudWatch308%
4Built in-house (no product adopted)226%
5Checkly175%
6Datadog164%
7Better Stack154%
8New Relic154%

What this means

Raised 139 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 139 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 360 sessions in observability are part of a published set of 5,292, run with real coding agents inside realistic codebases and judged blind. The full method is on one page: how we measured this.

Every observability run can be replayed on the board.

If you work on Prometheus: 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 Prometheus?

They raise it but do not choose it. Across 139 sessions where Prometheus came up as a candidate, agents chose something else every time.

Does Claude Code recommend Prometheus?

In 0 of the 120 sessions in observability run with Claude Code, which is 0%.

Do different coding agents treat Prometheus differently?

Not much. The three agents 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 51 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 5,292 judged sessions with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor inside 51 realistic codebases, and published every run. The numbers on this page come from that work.

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