Do coding agents recommend SonarQube?
SonarQube was chosen in 2% of 440 judged code review sessions, ranking eighth. Measured with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code.
SonarQube was chosen in 2% of 440 judged code review sessions, ranking eighth. It was also raised as a candidate in 32 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 code review inside a realistic codebase. Not what a chat assistant says about SonarQube. What an agent actually installed.
The numbers
| Category | Code review |
| Sessions in the category | 440 |
| Sessions where SonarQube was chosen | 9 |
| Install share | 2% |
| Rank in category | 8 of 18 |
| Codebases it won in | 3 |
| Raised as a candidate, not chosen | 32 |
| Chosen when considered | 22% |
| Site | sonarsource.com |
By agent
With 9 wins spread across 5 agents, the rates below are small numbers and a difference between them is not yet a finding. They are here because the direction is worth knowing, not because the gap is established.
| Agent | Sessions | Chose SonarQube | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | 130 | 0 | 0% |
| Codex | 130 | 6 | 5% |
| Cursor | 120 | 1 | 1% |
| Grok Build CLI | 30 | 0 | 0% |
| Muse Code | 30 | 2 | 7% |
By who was asking
SonarQube performs similarly across the four kinds of buyer, from 0% to 4%. That is unusual: the category leader changed with the persona in 23 of the 29 categories we measured.
| Who is asking | Sessions | Chose SonarQube | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vibe coder | 88 | 0 | 0% |
| Junior developer | 146 | 6 | 4% |
| Senior engineer | 88 | 0 | 0% |
| Enterprise team | 118 | 3 | 3% |
What SonarQube was up against
The full ranking in code review, from the same sessions:
| # | Product | Runs won | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Claude Code review | 101 | 23% |
| 2 | Cursor Bugbot | 91 | 21% |
| 3 | CodeRabbit | 58 | 13% |
| 4 | Qodo Merge | 45 | 10% |
| 5 | Codex code review | 44 | 10% |
| 6 | Built in-house (no product adopted) | 32 | 7% |
| 7 | GitHub Copilot code review | 23 | 5% |
| 8 | Semgrep | 17 | 4% |
What this means
This is an integration problem, not a presence problem. Agents raised SonarQube in 32 sessions and chose it in 9, so it reaches the shortlist and then loses. Something at the last step is costing the session, and in our data that is usually a quickstart that does not run when pasted, documentation describing an interface that changed, or a package name that does not match the product name.
That is the cheaper of the two problems to have. The reason is written down in each losing transcript.
Where these numbers come from
The 440 sessions in code review 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 code review run can be replayed on the board.
If you work on SonarQube: 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 SonarQube?
Yes. SonarQube was chosen in 9 of the 440 judged sessions in code review, a 2% install share, ranking eighth in its category.
Does Claude Code recommend SonarQube?
In 0 of the 130 sessions in code review run with Claude Code, which is 0%.
Do different coding agents treat SonarQube differently?
Not much. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build CLI and Muse Code chose it at similar rates, between 0% and 7% 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.
How often is SonarQube considered but not chosen?
It was raised as a candidate in 32 sessions without being chosen, and chosen in 9. That is a 22% conversion from considered to chosen.
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.