Qwen Code vs Aider vs OpenCode: I Ran the Same 12 Tasks Through 3 Local CLI Agents on One RTX 4070

I pointed three coding CLIs at the same local model and ran twelve tasks through each one. The model was Qwen 35B, hosted on an RTX 4070 12GB via llama-server with --cpu-moe. The tasks were mundane: build a hello.py, add a CLI flag to an existing script, write a failing test then fix it, refactor a Python file to split a class into two. Nothing you would not do on a Tuesday.

The results were not what I expected from reading each tool's README.

The three tools, in one line each

Aider: git-native pair-programming CLI (45k stars, Apache-2.0), most-used terminal option, mature and well-documented, handles repo-wide context through a repo map.

Qwen Code CLI: QwenLM's official fork of Gemini CLI (Apache-2.0), positioned as the "native" agent for Qwen models. Tested v0.18.1.