Most people
The one tool you'd roll out across the whole skill spectrum, from power users to complete beginners.
The question this slot answers: if you could only roll out one tool across a whole team - power users, competent generalists, and complete beginners alike - which one wastes the least of everybody’s time?
Why Codex takes gold
The UI/UX on the Codex/ChatGPT desktop app makes this one hard to argue with. It’s a genuinely fantastic application that serves the full spectrum: built-in browser, a plugins hub and marketplace, remote control from your phone, background agents - even pets. Power users get depth (minus a few performance issues when indexing multiple large repos); complete beginners get something that looks and behaves like software they already understand. It’s open source, first to most features, quick to adopt everyone else’s, and the subscription is among the best-subsidised in the industry. A lot of quality-of-life, for a lot of different people, in one app.
The runners-up
Cursor is the visual pick: click a component in the in-app browser, describe the change in English, watch it happen. For designers and PMs that interaction model is the difference between using the tool and not. It costs more per unit of work than the subsidised competition, and its pending acquisition raises a data-governance question we cover in Cloud agents - but the product itself is superb.
Claude Code is here despite being the satisfaction leader - 46% ‘most loved’ in the big JetBrains survey against Cursor’s 19%, with the highest CSAT of any AI coding tool. The people who use it, adore it. The reason it’s bronze in this slot and gold in Developers: the desktop app is complete doodoo, and a whole-team rollout lives or dies on the app.
Two challengers worth knowing about
Claude Cowork - Anthropic’s non-technical agent - is the wildcard. Anthropic’s own telemetry claims 1.2M sessions across 600,000+ organisations with over 90% of sessions having nothing to do with software development. Unaudited vendor numbers, but if they hold, the real ‘most people’ tool of 2027 might not be a coding tool at all. Watch this space. And GitHub Copilot has the largest paid installed base in the industry (4.7M seats) and near-zero presence in practitioner conversation - the most used and least loved tool in the category, which is its own kind of achievement.
What to do now
Default new teams to Codex desktop and spend the first hour on config - a minimal AGENTS.md and two or three skills - because it rewards it more than any other harness. Route your designers to Cursor. And let your terminal-dwellers keep Claude Code; they’ll fight you otherwise, and the survey says they’re right to.