FullSense ™ vs. the field
Honest competitive positioning. We list capabilities we’re behind on too — hiding them would just delay the gap-closing work.
At a glance
| Capability | Claude Code | Perplexity | Codex CLI | Gemini CLI | FullSense (llive + ll*) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Code editing (SOTA) | A | C | A | A− | A |
| Web research + citations | B | A+ | C | B+ (Google) | A (RAD-backed) |
| Autonomous resident loop | C (Stop on prompt) | F | C (full-auto) | C | A (ResidentRunner) |
| HITL workbench | F | F | C (approval mode) | C (approval mode) | A (llove TUI) |
| Memory persistence | C (file) | C (chat) | C (session) | C | A (SQLite Ledger) |
| On-prem inference | F (cloud) | F (cloud) | F (cloud) | F (cloud) | A (Ollama / LM Studio / vLLM) |
| CLI OSS | F | F | A (Apache-2.0) | A (Apache-2.0) | A |
| Backend OSS (end-to-end) | F | F | F | F | A (full OSS stack) |
| Audit Ledger (SIL) | F | F | F | F | A (per-action persistent log) |
| Dangerous-op gate | C (warning only) | F | A (approval mode) | A (approval mode) | A (Approval Bus) |
| MCP tool ecosystem | A | F | C | B (recent) | B (ll{domain} family) |
| Domain-specific adapters | C (generic) | C | C | C | A (lldesign / lltrade / planned llcad/lleda/llchip) |
Letter grades reflect 2026-05-16 state of the art. We update this page when any row shifts ±1 grade.
Where we are clearly ahead
- On-prem inference — All four competitors are cloud-only. FullSense runs end-to-end against your own Ollama / LM Studio / vLLM / TGI deployment.
- End-to-end OSS — Codex / Gemini publish OSS CLIs, but their backends (GPT, Gemini) are closed cloud APIs. FullSense lets you swap in any OSS model.
- Audit Ledger — None of the competitors persist a per-action audit log for compliance / law / reproducibility. llive’s SQLite Ledger does.
- HITL workbench — Competitors that have approval modes (Codex / Gemini) show one signal at a time in a CLI prompt. llove gives you a full TUI workbench where the human stays in the loop.
Where we are behind (and what we’re doing about it)
vs. Claude Code
- Coding precision — Claude Code is the current SOTA. We compete on safety (Approval Bus blocks dangerous ops at the API level, not as a text warning) and audit (every edit lands in the Ledger).
- MCP tool ecosystem — Anthropic ships dozens of MCP servers. Our path is domain-specific MCP servers from the ll{domain} family. Generic MCP parity is not the goal.
vs. Perplexity
- Citation UX — Perplexity’s citation rendering is excellent. We have the data (RAD 49 domains, ~49K documents, frozen so citations don’t rot), but the UX has to be built in llove.
- Reasoning UI — Perplexity Pro shows step-by-step thinking. The llive Ledger has this data; llove needs a timeline view to surface it.
vs. Codex CLI
- Approval mode polish — Codex’s
suggest / auto-edit / full-autois battle-tested. The llive Approval Bus has the right architecture but needs UX work: timeout policies, retry semantics, grouped approvals.
vs. Gemini CLI
- Web search integration — Gemini’s Google Search integration is first-class. Our RAD is frozen (great for stability, bad for “what happened this week”). The plan is to add WebFetch / SearXNG / Brave Search MCP integration through the ll{domain} layer, keeping the RAD as the high-trust tier.
Benchmark methodology
For every new feature in FullSense, we:
- Define a Brief that exercises the feature
- Run the same Brief against Claude Code, Perplexity, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, and the FullSense stack
- Score on: correctness, speed, citation quality, dangerous-op handling, cost, on-prem capability, backend OSS, audit log presence
- Publish the per-product benchmark results under each product’s
docs/benchmarks/<date>.md - Open issues for any axis where FullSense lost
Methodology details: feedback_competitor_benchmark in the maintainer’s tooling repo.
Empirical benchmarks (2026-05-16)
Four Briefs run against llive (FullSenseLoop.process) + ollama llama3.2:3b (on-prem) + Perplexity Sonar (cloud). Anthropic Haiku 4.5, Gemini 2.0 Flash, OpenAI Codex were attempted but failed for credential / quota reasons (operator action queued).
- Mermaid family-tree generation
- Quick Start section + MCP sequence diagram
- lltrade paper-trading strategy YAML
Headline of the day:
- llive does not yet generate (LLIVE-001 / LLIVE-002 in
docs/BUGS_2026-05-16_brief_ab.md) - ollama
llama3.2:3bis the working on-prem option but produces thelllivetypo (3 Ls) twice across 4 Briefs — tokenisation hostility to thell*naming convention. Recommended replacement: qwen2.5:14b+ - Perplexity Sonar scores 4/4 on spec compliance at ~$0.005/brief
Last updated
2026-05-16 — initial publication + first 4-Brief A/B run. Reviewed at: portal-side PROGRESS.md Phase 0.3 — umbrella expansion and Phase 0.3 — competitive positioning entries.