Best alternatives to Bullet in 2026

AI coding agents are genuinely useful, but anyone who's used one for a while knows the frustration of watching a spinner while it re-reads your whole codebase or waits on a single model call before doing the next thing. Bullet was built specifically to attack that waiting problem: instead of one model handling everything sequentially, it splits work by complexity and runs independent steps at the same time, so simple edits don't get stuck behind slow ones. Technically, Bullet is a CLI-based coding agent that routes tasks to different underlying models depending on how complex they are, performs targeted code search rather than embedding an entire repository up front (which is often what makes other agents slow to start), and parallelizes operations to cut down on queuing delays. It's free to use with no subscription or API key required to get started, which is unusual among coding agents and suggests either a freemium ramp or a different monetization plan down the line. It's built by a Y Combinator S26 team explicitly frustrated with the latency of existing agents like Claude Code.