From the experiment

Do coding agents recommend Recurly?

Coding agents raised Recurly in 100 of 548 judged usage-based billing sessions and chose it in none of them.

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

Coding agents raised Recurly in 100 of 548 judged usage-based billing 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 usage-based billing inside a realistic codebase. Not what a chat assistant says about Recurly. What an agent actually installed.

The numbers

CategoryUsage-based billing
Sessions in the category548
Sessions where Recurly was chosen0
Install share0%
Raised as a candidate, not chosen100
Chosen when considered0%
Siterecurly.com

Which agents raised Recurly

Every agent considered it and none adopted it. Cursor raised it most often, in 51% of its usage-based billing sessions.

AgentSessionsRaised RecurlyChose it
Claude Code12718 (14%)0
Codex1642 (1%)0
Cursor13267 (51%)0
Grok Build CLI264 (15%)0
Muse Code999 (9%)0

Which buyers it came up for

It surfaced most for requests written as enterprise team, in 24% of those sessions. Knowing which buyer already has the product in mind tells you which pages to fix first.

Who is askingSessionsRaised it
Junior developer10011 (11%)
Senior engineer20230 (15%)
Enterprise team24659 (24%)

What Recurly was up against

The full ranking in usage-based billing, from the same sessions:

#ProductRuns wonShare
1Metronome22541%
2Built in-house (no product adopted)10720%
3Orb8816%
4Lago6211%
5Stripe Billing132%
6CGRateS132%
7OpenMeter92%
8Oracle BRM71%

What this means

Raised 100 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 100 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 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 Recurly: 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 Recurly?

They raise it but do not choose it. Across 100 sessions where Recurly came up as a candidate, agents chose something else every time.

Does Claude Code recommend Recurly?

In 0 of the 127 sessions in usage-based billing run with Claude Code, which is 0%.

Do different coding agents treat Recurly differently?

Not much. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor 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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