Supported agents
A verified comparison of the coding agents LinkCode drives, covering setup, sign-in, approval behavior, models, reasoning effort, commands, and thread resume.
LinkCode drives five coding agents: Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi, and Grok Build. They are not interchangeable — each has its own setup path, sign-in model, and relationship to asking before it acts. This page is the single reference for those differences; every other page links back here instead of repeating the table.
Not every agent asks before acting
Claude Code, Codex, and Pi ask for permission and let you choose how strict that is. OpenCode asks only where your own OpenCode configuration says to — by default it runs unattended. Grok Build never asks and cannot be switched: its headless mode has no way to wait for an answer. If you're new to LinkCode, start with Claude Code.
Capability matrix
| Getting the agent | Sign-in | Approval policy | Model picker | Reasoning effort | Resume a stopped thread | Rich diffs for edits | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | Download in-app, or your own install | In-app, or an account you add | 5 policies | Curated list | Low → Max, plus Ultracode | Yes | Yes |
| Codex | Download in-app, or your own install | In-app, or an account you add | 3 policies | Curated list | Per model, next turn | Yes | Yes |
| OpenCode | Download in-app, or your own install | OpenCode's own sign-in, or an account you add | Its own agents | From your connected providers | No | Yes | No — plain text |
| Pi | Download in-app; runs in-process | Its own auth file/env vars, or an account you add | 3 policies | From Pi's provider registry | Per model, Low → xHigh | Yes | No — plain text |
| Grok Build | Install the grok CLI yourself | The grok CLI's own login, or an account you add | None — always unattended | Grok 4.5 | Low → High | No | No — plain text |
Verified against LinkCode v0.15.1.
Getting an agent onto your machine
LinkCode ships no agent binaries. The first time you pick an agent, it resolves one in this order:
- Managed — a copy LinkCode downloaded into its own store, pinned to the version this release was tested against. The first download always asks; later refreshes for an agent you already have happen quietly.
- Detected — an install already on your machine, found on the host's
PATHor in the usual install locations and version-checked. If it isn't the paired version, the agent is marked Unverified: usable, but untested against this release. - Neither — the agent shows Not installed, with a Download button. Grok Build has no managed download; install the
grokCLI yourself.
Settings → Agents shows which of the three each agent is currently using.
Accounts and API keys
Agents authenticate through Settings → Providers, where you add the account once and connect it to whichever agents should use it: a Claude or ChatGPT subscription, a direct API key (Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI), a gateway (OpenRouter, Vercel AI Gateway, Cloudflare AI Gateway), or a custom endpoint. One account can back several agents; each agent uses one account at a time.
An agent with no account connected falls back to its own CLI login — the credentials you'd use if you ran it in a terminal. Claude Code and Codex can complete that login from inside LinkCode. Everything you enter is stored encrypted on the host and never written into an agent's own config files; LinkCode reads those files only to list and import existing history.
Choosing an agent
- Claude Code is the most complete integration: five approval policies, a curated model list, live reasoning-effort switching, subagent transcripts, and history shared with the
claudeCLI. It's the safest default. - Codex is close behind: real approval prompts, per-model effort,
$shell passthrough, and it honors the sandbox in your own~/.codex/config.tomluntil you pick a policy yourself. - OpenCode brings your own provider set and its own agent definitions, and it's the one whose permission behavior is driven by your OpenCode config rather than LinkCode.
- Pi runs in-process across roughly two dozen providers, with LinkCode supplying the approval prompts Pi itself has no concept of.
- Grok Build is the least integrated: no approvals, no resume, no commands.
For the reasoning behind approval policies vs. one-off permission prompts, see approvals. For how thread resume works in general, see threads.