Meta has announced an early beta of Muse Code, a new coding agent designed to compete with Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. The terminal based coding tool is powered by Muse Spark 1.2, an updated version of Meta’s AI model that the company says brings improvements to code generation, complex debugging, codebase understanding and broader developer workflows.
Similar to its competitors, Muse Code is designed to handle software engineering tasks such as writing code, planning changes and validating results, allowing developers to build working software through text prompts rather than manual coding alone. The tool can also manage multiple sub-agents and delegate tasks to complete work more efficiently, a capability aimed at handling more complex, multi step development projects. Meta’s announcement included sample projects demonstrating the tool’s capabilities, along with a demo video showing Muse Code building a webpage based on an MP4 file.
Pricing appears to be a central part of how Meta is positioning Muse Code against its competitors. The company said the tool uses the same pay as you go pricing structure as Muse Spark by default, charging $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens. Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexander Wang said the company would also introduce a lower cost contributor tier, which according to reports would require users to agree to provide feedback to help improve the coding agent, priced at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.20 per million output tokens.
These prices sit notably below Anthropic’s Sonnet 5 model, which typically costs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. If Muse Code performs well, the pricing gap could influence some companies to choose Meta’s tool over competing options, a dynamic that has already played out with several companies shifting toward lower cost Chinese AI models such as DeepSeek in order to reduce spending on AI tools. Whether Muse Code can match the performance of more established coding agents remains to be seen, but its aggressive pricing signals Meta’s intent to compete on cost as it enters a space currently dominated by Anthropic and OpenAI.
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