The May piece (Every AI Coding CLI in 2026: the complete map, 30 tools compared) sorted tools by pricing and openness. That is one axis. It is not the axis a reader actually cares about when they open a terminal and need to pick something. The axis that matters is surface affordance: what shape of work am I trying to do, and what shape of tool meets that shape?
This follow-up reorganises around that question, narrows to engineers using terminals, and refreshes everything that changed in 30 days. The Desktop / Cloud Web / Cloud Agent piece (for non-technical builders) is the companion article.
Two framing observations before the lists.
First: the wars are over and the wire format is settled. Every serious CLI harness in mid-2026 accepts at least one of OpenAI-compatible or Anthropic-Messages endpoints. The "which protocol" question stopped mattering. The "which provider, which model, at what price" question is the live one.
Second: "free" almost always means free-software-plus-paid-tokens. The CLI is open source and free; the API tokens it spends are not. There are still a handful of genuinely-free-with-a-real-model offerings, but the centre of gravity moved.
