Depwire vs Aider vs Cursor vs Sourcegraph Cody: Which AI Coding Tool Actually Knows Your Codebase?
In 2026, there are more AI coding tools than ever. But they’re not all solving the same problem.
Aider — terminal pair programmer. The repo map summarizes your codebase. Fast, zero-config, great for feature implementation. Accuracy: ~85% — misses function body dependencies.
Cursor — IDE built on VS Code. Local RAG + context injection. Best for day-to-day coding. Accuracy: ~70% — misses semantically distant dependencies.
Sourcegraph Cody — enterprise-scale semantic search. Best for 500+ engineer teams. Accuracy: ~75% — struggles with deep call chains.
Depwire — none of these. It’s the context-and-safety layer. Deterministic dependency graph via tree-sitter, served to any MCP-compatible AI tool.
The security angle nobody talks about:
Cursor and Aider write code. They don’t know if what they wrote is reachable from an unauthenticated HTTP route. Depwire ran its security scanner on honojs/hono and found 6 critical vulnerabilities — elevated to critical because the graph knew they were reachable from HTTP handlers.
That’s what graph-aware severity means. No generic scanner does this.
When to use each:
- Aider: greenfield features, git integration, terminal workflow
- Cursor: everyday IDE coding, under 200 files
- Cody: enterprise, cross-repo search
- Depwire: refactoring, security scanning, architecture understanding — use alongside any of the above
GitHub: https://github.com/depwire/depwire — 3,800+ downloads/month
npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/depwire-cli
Website: https://depwire.dev
Cloud: https://app.depwire.dev