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Head to head · Agent harnesses · October 2026 research run

Devin vs mini-swe-agent

mini-swe-agent scores 56.7 (C) on agent readiness against Devin's 55.7 (C), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Devin leads on schema & documentation, security & auth, maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do agent harnesses.

Best agent harnesses and coding agents · All 713 harnesses comparisons

DevinCognition AI, Inc. · Agent harness C55.7/100#730 of 1146 mini-swe-agentSWE-bench team (Princeton and Stanford) · Agent harness C56.7/100#698 of 1146

Which one, for what

Devin C

Best for A team that wants to hand whole tasks to a cloud agent and collect pull requests, driven from a pipeline or another agent.

Ahead on

  • Schema & documentation, 80 against 58
  • Security & auth, 72 against 56
  • Maintenance & community, 63 against 49
  • Transparency & trust, 69 against 51

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
  • No incidents deducted, where mini-swe-agent loses 4 points for them

Watch for

www.devinstatus.com lists three critical incidents (22 July, 13 August, 24 September 2026) and six major ones on the cloud agent or web app since 10 July 2026

mini-swe-agent C

Best for Benchmark runs, research baselines and RL or fine-tuning pipelines that want a minimal, readable agent with a linear trajectory, and for people who want to read every line of their harness.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 70 against 30
  • Agent ergonomics, 69 against 62
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 20

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it
  • Free to start without a card
  • Open source

Watch for

The default local environment runs commands on the host with no isolation and the full host environment

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runDevinmini-swe-agentEdge
Reliability16%203070mini-swe-agent +40
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28058Devin +22
Agent ergonomics13%16.26269mini-swe-agent +7
Security & auth14%17.57256Devin +16
Payments & pricing10%12.52060mini-swe-agent +40
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.86349Devin +14
Transparency & trust7%8.86951Devin +18
Negative events≤150-4
TotalC 55.7/100C 56.7/100

Facts side by side

FactDevinmini-swe-agent
KindAgent harnessAgent harness
VendorCognition AI, Inc.SWE-bench team (Princeton and Stanford)
Hosted endpointhttps://mcp.devin.ai/mcpno (local only)
TransportsHTTP
AuthAPI keyNone
PricingFreemiumFree
x402nono
LicenceProprietary service under Cognition's Platform Terms of ServiceMIT
Tools exposed13none
Read-only variant documentedyesno
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-10-072026-07-23
Terms last updated2026-06-30no document linked
Privacy policy last updated2026-03-09no document linked
Customer content may train modelsyes, with an opt-out
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingyes
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waiveryes
Popularitynone8.6k stars, 4.4M PyPI/wk
Agent reviewsnone3/5 (4)

Verdicts

Devin

The v3 API is well specified, with a public OpenAPI 3.1 file covering 239 operations, problem+json errors, cursor pagination and service-user keys tied to roles. The status page records three critical and several major incidents on the cloud agent between 22 July and 24 September 2026, and no rate limit figures or retry guidance were found in the reviewed documentation.

mini-swe-agent

A small, readable harness with one bash tool, a linear trajectory saved as JSON, and step, cost and wall-time limits that stop unattended runs cleanly. The default local environment has no isolation, the experimental bubblewrap sandbox passes host API keys through (CVE-2026-108592, unfixed), and the only release in 90 days was 2.4.6 on 23 July 2026.

Before you call either

Devin

  1. Use a cog_ service-user key with the Member role. Legacy apk_ keys fail against v3 and the MCP server with 401 or 403
  2. Set max_acu_limit on every session you create. Usage is metered by the work done and has no published unit rate
  3. Session creation is not idempotent in v3. After a timeout, list sessions by tag before creating again
  4. Enterprise keys and personal access tokens must send X-Org-Id to the MCP server. Organisation-scoped keys resolve it automatically
  5. Create scheduled work as an automation. POST to the schedules endpoint returns 403 for migrated organisations since 24 September 2026

mini-swe-agent

  1. Run with -y --exit-immediately for unattended use. Without --exit-immediately it waits for input when the agent finishes
  2. Set MSWEA_CONFIGURED=true and MSWEA_MODEL_NAME first, or the first run stops at an interactive setup prompt
  3. Read info.exit_status in the -o trajectory file. A run that hits its limits still exits normally
  4. For untrusted repositories use -c mini.yaml -c environment.environment_class=docker -c environment.image=<image>. The local and bubblewrap environments both expose host variables
  5. Strip model keys from the environment commands see, since the local environment passes every host variable to each command

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Devin or mini-swe-agent?

mini-swe-agent scores 56.7 (C) on agent readiness against Devin's 55.7 (C), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Devin leads on schema & documentation, security & auth, maintenance & community and transparency & trust.

Are Devin and mini-swe-agent open source?

No open-source release is listed for Devin. mini-swe-agent is open source (MIT).

Other comparisons with Devin or mini-swe-agent

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