Don't standardize your company's coding agents (ben.page)

Companies are being urged not to lock into a single coding agent yet. While the fragmentation—Cursor, Codex, Claude Code, Amp and others—creates pain (each uses different rules files, modes, prompting techniques and sandboxing models), the piece argues that it’s premature to choose one “gold standard” for everyone. Standardization buys modest efficiency (fewer documentation variants, unified workflows) but also forces a static choice in a space that evolves weekly, if not daily. For the AI/ML community the stakes are practical: mandating one agent risks missing the next big leap in developer productivity or capability. The author recommends letting interested engineers experiment with multiple agents so teams can surface genuinely superior tools rather than defaulting to unified billing or a single rules file. In short, favor exploration and lightweight, company-wide learning over premature standardization—opt for breadth now to avoid hard-to-reverse opportunity costs later.