The AI coding tool market was supposed to consolidate. One winner would emerge, developers would standardize around it, and the industry would move forward. Instead, the opposite happened. In the first week of April 2026, Cursor shipped a rebuilt interface for orchestrating parallel agents, OpenAI published an official plugin that runs inside Anthropic’s Claude Code, and early adopters started running all three together. Not as competitors. As layers in a stack that nobody designed but that is assembling itself anyway.
The pattern mirrors something developers already know from infrastructure. Nobody runs a single observability tool. You run Prometheus for metrics, Grafana for dashboards, and PagerDuty for alerts. Each tool does one thing well, and the value comes from how they compose. AI coding tools are following the same path, splitting into specialized layers rather than collapsing into a single product.