DEV Community: ninghonggang

The 45-tool problem: why Juejin 必备 roundups have stopped helping me pick AI tools

ninghonggang — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 11:05:49 +0000

I went down a rabbit hole this morning reading four late-2025 Juejin AI tool roundups back to back, and the thing that finally crystallized for me is that the Juejin "必备" list has quietly inflated from a curated seven or eight tools to a curated forty-five, and the engineers I know who are actually shipping code in 2026 are still running on roughly the same three or four. I would not have written that sentence six months ago, and I want to put it down somewhere I can find it before the roundup format gets even longer.

The piece that pushed me over the edge was the Juejin post that opened with "2025年45个高效的AI工具盘点" and then ran through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, boardmix AI, Midjourney, Synthesia, Google Veo, OpusClip, Perplexity, Canva Magic Studio, Looka, Notion Q&A, Guru, Hubspot Email Writer, Fyxer, Shortwave, Manus, the Operator-style agent tools, and roughly twenty more, with a per-category "best pick" header for each slice of the market. To be fair the post was trying to be exhaustive rather than opinionated, and I am taking the exact tool count with a grain of salt because the post openly admitted it was rounding up to fill the title, but the shape of the roundup is the part that has been rattling around in my head all morning. The companion 2025 IDE ranking post named nine tools in a matrix, the AI office tools post named seven, the AI coding tools comparison named four, and the data tools post named ten. When I stack the four posts side by side the union set is somewhere north of fifty distinct product names, and the intersection of tools that show up in all four is basically Cursor, ChatGPT, and Claude Code. Honestly I am a little skeptical of any AI tool ecosystem that needs forty-five entries to feel complete, because the working engineers I talk to are not running forty-five tools, they are running three.

The meta-pattern I want to put down before I forget it is that the Juejin roundup format has been optimizing for completeness and in the process has lost the curation signal. The 2024 roundups I bookmarked were eight tools, tightly ranked, with one clear winner per category and a sentence on why the runner-up lost. The late-2025 roundups are forty-five tools, vaguely bucketed, with explicit 谁先选 and 谁备选 labels next to each row and an implicit understanding that nobody is going to install all of them. To be fair the format is responding to a real signal, which is that the AI tool market genuinely did explode in 2025, and the post that only names eight tools is going to look incomplete to the reader who has heard of Manus and 即梦 AI and 灵绘 AI and Gamma and Dify and the forty other tools that show up in their feeds. But the format has crossed a line where completeness stops being a feature and starts being a productivity tax, and I think the working engineers I know would rather see the four tools the author actually uses than the forty-five tools the author has heard of.

The practical takeaway I want to call out is that the Juejin 必备 roundups are still genuinely useful for two narrow jobs and not very useful for the third job most readers think they are doing the job for. They are good at the discovery job, because the first time you hear about a tool like Manus or Dify or Coze or the newer mem0-style memory layer projects it is usually through one of these posts, and the bucketing is better than scrolling Twitter. They are good at the pricing job, because the AI tool pricing guide style posts really do anchor on the twenty-dollar monthly tier and call out which tools are above or below it. They are not good at the picking job, and that is the job most readers are actually trying to do. To pick a tool you need a benchmark or a case study or a stress test from someone who has actually used it for a quarter, and none of the forty-five-tool roundups I read this morning had any of those for the tools past position five. I have not stress-tested Manus or Dify or 即梦 AI the way I have with Cursor and Claude Code and ChatGPT, so I want to actually run them for a quarter before I oversell or undersell them, but the fact that the roundups keep listing them as 首选 without showing any usage data is the part that tells me the format is recommending on vibes, not on evidence.

I will reassess in three months. The last time I said that I was mostly bouncing between Cursor and Claude Code for coding and ChatGPT Plus for everything else, which is still roughly where I land. What has changed is that I now treat the Juejin 必备 roundups as a discovery feed rather than a buying guide, and I think that split is going to age well. Give it six months and I expect either the roundups to compress back down to a curated short list or the working engineers to stop reading them entirely, and whichever one moves first will tell me whether the format is going to survive the AI tool market's own expansion.

The 2025 Juejin AI tool roundups are scoring 2026 tools on 2024 criteria

ninghonggang — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 11:06:13 +0000

I went down a rabbit hole this morning reading three late-2025 Juejin AI tool roundups back to back, and the thing that finally crystallized for me is that the Juejin 2025年度盘点 and the December 2025 AI IDE ranking and the 2025 AI tool pricing guide are all rating the same Chinese-language AI market on the same five axes they were using a year ago, and almost none of the projects that have been dominating GitHub trending in 2025 show up on any of those scorecards. I would not have written that sentence six months ago, and I want to put it down somewhere I can find it.

The piece that pushed me over the edge was the 2025年度盘点 that ran across the Juejin front page this week. Twelve scenarios, twelve categories, every entry rated as首选 or 其他, prices listed in 人民币 per month. Cursor sits at the top of the IDE list with the same two-axis argument it had in 2024, GitHub Copilot sits below it for the same ecosystem reason, Codeium sits below that for the same free-tier reason, v0 sits in the front-end slot for the same Vercel integration reason. The December 2025 IDE ranking that came out the same week gave Tencent CodeBuddy a 9.6, Sourcegraph Cody an 8.2, Replit Ghostwriter an 8.0, Codeium a 7.8, Tabnine a 7.6, Amazon CodeWhisperer a 7.5, JetBrains AI Assistant a 7.4, Blackbox a 7.2, on the same five axes as the post before it. To be fair the post that gave CodeBuddy the 9.6 was transparently written by an advocate, and I am taking the exact decimal scores with a grain of salt because the benchmark methodology is never disclosed, but the shape of the scorecard is the part that has been rattling around in my head all morning. We are scoring 2026 tools on 2024 criteria, and the gap is visible to anyone who reads a Juejin 年度盘点 and a GitHub trending recap in the same week.

The April, May, June, and October 2025 GitHub trending recaps surfaced Agent-S for GUI automation, Graphiti for memory graphs, supermemory for persistent context, mem0 for the memory layer pattern, FastMCP for plugin frameworks, claude-cookbooks as the Anthropic reference, TradingAgents-CN for multi-agent finance, and most recently AGENTS.md as a proposed standard for handing project context to AI coding agents. None of those projects compete on autocomplete latency. None of them have a SOC2 score. None of them show up in the Juejin 年度盘点, and the absence is the data point. Honestly I am a little skeptical of any Chinese-language AI tool ranking that scores tools on the enterprise procurement axis and ignores the agent runtime and memory layer axis, because the engineers I know who are picking tools right now are not buying autocomplete with chat. They are buying the ability to hand off an ambiguous problem to an agent and get back a multi-file edit with a hypothesis walk-through, and the Juejin scorecards do not even have a column for that.

The practical takeaway I want to call out is that the late-2025 Juejin roundups are still useful for tracking domestic-only products like Tencent CodeBuddy and 即梦 AI and 灵绘 AI and for getting a read on enterprise procurement preferences in the Asia-Pacific region, and the 2025年度盘点 does a good job of bucketing the chat and image and video categories by 谁先选 and 谁备选. But if you are a working engineer trying to decide which AI coding tool to pay for in 2026, the answer is almost certainly going to come from the GitHub trending recaps and the English-language reviews of Cursor and Claude Code and the memory layer projects like mem0 and supermemory, not from a list that scored Codeium at 7.8 in December 2025 on a five-axis scorecard that has not been updated since 2024. I have not stress-tested Agent-S or Graphiti the way I have with Cursor and Claude Code, so I want to actually ship something on top of them before I oversell or undersell them, but the fact that three separate Chinese-language roundups converged on the same five-axis scorecard with the same decimal scores tells me the roundup format itself is being copy-pasted rather than written from scratch, and that is a structural problem the format is going to have to solve if it wants to stay relevant for working engineers rather than enterprise procurement teams.

I will reassess in three months. The last time I said that I was mostly on Cursor and Claude Code for coding and ChatGPT for everything else, which is still roughly where I land. What has changed is that I now read the Juejin AI tool roundups as a useful artifact for the enterprise procurement market and the 国产 AI tool ecosystem specifically, and I read the GitHub trending recaps as the source of truth for what to actually build with, and I think that split is going to age well. Give it six months and I expect the Chinese-language roundups to start including the agent runtime layer and the memory layer projects on the scorecard, and when that happens I will know the format has finally caught up with what the engineers have been shipping on GitHub all year.

The Scorecard Is From 2024: What December 2025 Juejin AI Coding Roundups Are Missing

ninghonggang — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 11:07:32 +0000

I went down a rabbit hole this morning reading three December 2025 Juejin AI coding tool roundups back to back, and the thing that finally crystallized for me is that every single one of them is scoring the same five axes — autocomplete latency in milliseconds, response speed tier, a star rating for autonomous agent capability, a security and compliance score for SSO and SOC2, and a team collaboration star count — and almost none of them have updated the scorecard itself since 2024. The first ranking scored Tencent CodeBuddy at 9.6 with 200ms autocomplete and full SOC2. The second scored Sourcegraph Cody at 8.2, Replit Ghostwriter at 8.0, Codeium at 7.8, Tabnine at 7.6, Amazon CodeWhisperer at 7.5, JetBrains AI Assistant at 7.4, Blackbox at 7.2, on the same five axes. The third was a Cursor versus Claude Code versus Codex versus Lovable versus v0 head-to-head that bucketed everything into S, A, B, and D tiers with autocomplete latency and IDE hooks as the dominant criteria. I would not have written that sentence six months ago.

The piece that pushed me over the edge was noticing that the same five scorecard axes are being applied to tools that are not even competing on those axes anymore. Cursor is not really selling autocomplete speed in 2026, it is selling the Plan Mode agent runtime and the Tab key flow and the inline Cmd+K review. Claude Code is not selling response speed, it is selling the ability to hand off genuinely ambiguous problems and get back a multi-file edit with a hypothesis walk-through. GitHub Copilot has been quietly repositioning around the agent runtime story and Copilot Chat and PR summaries, which barely show up in any of the three scorecards I read this morning. To be fair autocomplete latency is still a real product feature and I am taking the exact millisecond numbers with a grain of salt because the benchmark methodology is rarely disclosed, but the shape of the scorecard is the part that has been rattling around in my head all morning. We are scoring 2026 tools on 2024 criteria, and the gap is visible to anyone who reads a Juejin IDE ranking and a GitHub trending recap in the same week.

The April, May, June, and October 2025 GitHub trending recaps surfaced Agent-S for GUI automation, Graphiti for memory graphs, supermemory for persistent context, mem0 for the memory layer pattern, FastMCP for plugin frameworks, claude-cookbooks as the Anthropic reference, and most recently AGENTS.md as a proposed standard for handing project context to AI coding agents. None of those projects compete on autocomplete latency. None of them have a SOC2 score. None of them show up in the December Juejin IDE rankings, and the absence is the data point. Honestly I am a little skeptical of any AI coding tool ranking that scores tools on the enterprise procurement axis and ignores the agent runtime and memory layer axis, because the engineers I know who are picking tools right now are not buying autocomplete with chat.

The practical takeaway I want to call out is that the December 2025 Chinese-language AI coding tool rankings are still useful for tracking domestic-only products like Tencent CodeBuddy and for getting a read on enterprise procurement preferences in the Asia-Pacific region. But if you are a working engineer trying to decide which AI coding tool to pay for in 2026, the answer is almost certainly going to come from the GitHub trending recaps and the English-language reviews of Cursor and Claude Code, not from a list that scored Codeium at 7.8 in December 2025 on a five-axis scorecard that has not been updated since 2024. I have not stress-tested Tencent CodeBuddy the way I have with Cursor and Claude Code, so I want to actually run it for a quarter before I oversell or undersell it, but the fact that three separate Chinese-language roundups converged on the same five-axis scorecard with the same decimal scores tells me the roundup format itself is being copy-pasted rather than written from scratch, and that is a structural problem the format is going to have to solve if it wants to stay relevant for working engineers rather than enterprise procurement teams.

I will reassess in three months. The last time I said that I was mostly on Cursor and Claude Code for coding and ChatGPT for everything else, which is still roughly where I land. What has changed is that I now read the Juejin AI coding tool roundups as a useful artifact for the enterprise procurement market specifically, and I read the GitHub trending recaps as the source of truth for what to actually build with, and I think that split is going to age well. Give it six months and I expect the Chinese-language roundups to start including the agent runtime layer and the memory layer projects on the scorecard, and when that happens I will know the format has finally caught up with what the engineers have been shipping on GitHub all year.

Agent Runtime Was the GitHub Trending Story of 2025 and the Juejin IDE Rankings Missed It

ninghonggang — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 11:05:46 +0000

I spent the morning going through the 2025 Juejin GitHub trending recaps back to back — April, May, June, and October — and the thing that finally crystallized for me is that one category of project has been on the trending list almost every single month of 2025 and the Juejin AI IDE roundups have barely mentioned it once. Agent-S, Graphiti, supermemory, mem0, FastMCP, claude-cookbooks, TradingAgents-CN, the llm-course repo, the leaked-system-prompts repo. Every one of those is an agent-runtime or memory-layer or prompt-engineering project, and almost none of them appear in the same Juejin posts that score Cursor at the top of the AI IDE list and ChatGPT at the top of the pricing guide. I would not have written that sentence six months ago, and I want to put it down somewhere I can find it.

The piece that pushed me over the edge was reading the April, May, June, and October GitHub trending recaps in sequence and noticing that the same handful of agent-runtime repos kept showing up month after month. April had Agent-S for GUI automation, Graphiti for memory graphs, FastMCP for plugin frameworks, and claude-cookbooks as the Anthropic reference. May had mem0 for persistent recall, supermemory for cross-tool context, and AgenticSeek as a local-first privacy alternative. June had Anthropic Cookbook again and KiloCode as a VS Code agent extension. October came back with supermemory and Agent-S again plus claude-cookbooks still. To be fair the roundups each had ten projects and only four or five of them were agent-runtime pieces, but the fact that Agent-S and claude-cookbooks and the memory-layer repos kept resurfacing across four separate monthly recaps is the part that has been rattling around in my head all morning. That is not a one-month story, that is the story of 2025.

The meta-pattern I want to put down before I forget it is that the agent-runtime category has been the dominant GitHub trending story of 2025, and the Juejin AI IDE and pricing roundups have been telling a different story entirely. The December 2025 IDE ranking scored Tencent CodeBuddy at 9.6, Sourcegraph Cody at 8.2, Codeium at 7.8, Tabnine at 7.6, JetBrains AI Assistant at 7.4, and the rest, with the implicit message that the AI IDE race is between autocomplete-with-chat tools that have been around since 2023. The pricing guide from the same week anchored on the twenty-dollar monthly tier and talked about Cursor and ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro and GitHub Copilot as if those four were the only game in town. To be fair all four of those tools are real products that I use every week, and I am taking the IDE scores with a grain of salt because the post that gave CodeBuddy the 9.6 was transparently written by an advocate. But the shape of the gap is the part that matters. The GitHub trending recaps are tracking where the engineers are actually pushing code, and the IDE and pricing roundups are tracking where the marketing dollars are being spent, and those are two different markets.

Honestly I think the practical takeaway here is that if you are picking AI tooling in 2026 based on the Chinese-language IDE and pricing roundups alone, you are reading two documents that are six to nine months behind the GitHub trending curve. Cursor and Claude Code are still my daily drivers and ChatGPT Plus is still where I land for everything else, so I am not telling anyone to abandon those. But the projects I am now bookmarking and returning to are Agent-S for the agent-runtime pattern, Graphiti and mem0 and supermemory for the memory-layer pattern, FastMCP for the plugin framework pattern, and claude-cookbooks for the reference implementation. I have not stress-tested Agent-S or Graphiti the way I have with Cursor and Claude Code, so I want to actually ship something on top of them before I oversell or undersell them, but the fact that four separate monthly GitHub trending recaps put these projects on the list and the IDE roundups never did tells me the roundup format itself is scoring the wrong axis, and that is the gap I want to call out before more people make tooling decisions based on it.

I will reassess in three months. The last time I said that I was mostly on Cursor and Claude Code for coding and ChatGPT for everything else, which is still roughly where I land. What has changed is that I now treat the monthly GitHub trending recaps as the source of truth for what to actually build with, and the Juejin IDE and pricing roundups as a lagging indicator for the enterprise procurement market specifically, and I think that split is going to age well. Give it six months and I expect the Chinese-language IDE roundups to start scoring Agent-S and FastMCP and the memory-layer repos alongside the autocomplete tools, and when that happens I will know the roundup format has finally caught up with what the engineers have been shipping on GitHub all year.

The Gaming Tier List Has Quietly Colonized AI Tool Reviews

ninghonggang — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 11:04:53 +0000

I went down a rabbit hole this morning reading the 2025 Juejin AI tool roundups back to back, and the thing that finally crystallized for me is that the gaming tier list has quietly colonized the AI tool review, and almost nobody is naming it as the phenomenon it is. The first search result I opened had Cursor at S, Claude Code at A, Replit and Chef at B, with explicit "闭眼选" and "强烈考虑" and "先观望" labels next to each row. I have seen the same S-A-B-C-D scaffolding in at least four different Juejin roundups in the last month, sometimes with an extra F tier, sometimes with plus and minus sub-grades, sometimes collapsed into "S档", "A档", "B档", "D档" with no C at all. It is the same visual grammar you see in every Genshin Impact character tier list, every League of Legends champion ranking, every Smash Bros matchup chart, just with Cursor and Claude Code and v0 standing in for the characters. To be fair I think the format works for the format's intended audience, and I want to put down why I am a little skeptical of it as a buying signal before I forget.

The piece that pushed me over the edge was the "2025 年 AI 编程工具评测" post, which laid out a clean S-tier for Cursor, an A for Claude Code, a B for Replit and Chef, and a D for the long tail, with bullet points for "技术开发者" or "非技术用户" next to every row. The reasoning is not bad — Cursor gets S for the community and the Claude Sonnet support, Claude Code gets A for the underlying model quality, Replit and Chef get B for being good-but-narrow. The shape of the analysis is reasonable. What I find interesting is that the tier labels themselves do not really mean anything measurable. There is no benchmark behind an S, there is no score range that maps to A, there is no reason a tool jumps from B to A other than the author deciding it has earned it. I have not stress-tested Chef or Replit the way I have with Cursor and Claude Code, so I would not oversell or undersell the comparison, but the tier-list scaffolding is a vibes format dressed up as a ranking format, and the vibes are doing all the work.

The contrast with the more grounded roundups is doing a lot of heavy lifting in my head right now. The 2025 AI tool pricing guide post from the same set of search results laid out ChatGPT Plus at twenty dollars a month, Claude Pro at twenty, Google AI Pro at 19.99, Grok Premium Plus at forty, Perplexity Pro at twenty, Midjourney at thirty, and just said what each one costs and what you get. The persona-specific list post said "if you are a front-end engineer, here are four tools" and then named them. The case study post said "I shipped production code with both of these, here is where each one broke." None of those posts needed an S or an A or a D, and I had not really noticed that the S-tier format was the odd one out until I read five of these in one sitting. Honestly I think the gaming tier list is a 2024 artifact the AI tool ecosystem has not quite outgrown, the same way the eight-tool scoring matrix was a 2024 artifact the roundup ecosystem is currently outgrowing.

The meta-pattern I want to put down before I forget it is that the S-A-B tier list is borrowing the visual authority of competitive gaming rankings to compensate for the fact that AI tools do not actually have a clean ranked order. In League of Legends there is a real patch-by-patch win rate you can point to. In Genshin there is a Spiral Abyss clear rate. For Cursor versus Claude Code versus v0 there is no equivalent number, and the tier list is the workaround. I am a little skeptical of any S-tier label that does not show the underlying benchmark, but I also get why the format exists. A reader who has never used any of these tools wants a one-glance answer, and the tier list gives them one. The second-time buyer wants the case study. The third-time buyer wants the pricing math. The S-tier post is the first-time-buyer's format, and the Juejin roundups are right to keep writing them, but I am going to keep skipping them in my own reading.

I will reassess in three months. The last time I said that I was mostly bouncing between Cursor and Claude Code, which is still where I land for coding, and reading the S-tier roundups is still useful for catching tools I had not heard of. What has changed is that I now read the S-A-B-D label as a flag to check the underlying reasoning rather than as a buying recommendation, and I think that filter is going to age well. Give it six months and the gaming tier list format might evolve into something with a real benchmark behind the letters, but for now the letters are doing all the work and I am done pretending an S is a measurement.

The Twenty-Dollar Anchor: What the AI Tool Pricing Guides Are Actually Telling Us

ninghonggang — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 11:05:07 +0000

I went down a rabbit hole this morning reading the late-2025 Juejin AI tool pricing guides back to back, and the thing that finally crystallized for me is that the AI assistant market has settled on a twenty-dollar monthly anchor so firmly that any tool priced meaningfully above it is now a deliberate lifestyle product rather than a daily driver. I would not have written that sentence six months ago, and I want to put it down somewhere I can find it.

The piece that pushed me over the edge was the 2025 AI tool pricing guide post that ran across the Juejin front page this week. ChatGPT Plus at twenty dollars, Claude Pro at twenty, Google AI Pro at nineteen ninety-nine, Grok Premium Plus at forty, Perplexity Pro at twenty, Midjourney standard at thirty, and a ChatGPT Pro tier sitting at two hundred dollars a month that the post mostly waved at and moved on from. To be fair the post was trying to be helpful rather than opinionated, and I am taking the exact dollar numbers with a grain of salt because the Chinese-language market has regional discounts and student tiers I do not have access to, but the shape of the curve is the part that has been rattling around in my head all morning. Four out of the six flagship assistants are priced within a dollar of each other. That is not a market, that is a cartel with one holdout.

The Grok tier is the interesting exception, and I think it is the canary. Grok Premium Plus has been pushed up to forty dollars a month, and the standalone SuperGrok subscription sits at thirty. The post flagged that this is up from twenty-two dollars, which is a forty-percent price hike in a market where everyone else is hovering at twenty. To be fair X is paying for the integration and the real-time data, and I am honestly not sure if the price reflects the value of the model or the cost of the X distribution, but the fact that a serious player chose to step outside the twenty-dollar band tells me the anchor is not as inevitable as it looks. The two-hundred-dollar ChatGPT Pro tier is the other canary, sitting far enough above the band that it stops looking like a subscription and starts looking like an enterprise contract you pay retail for. Both moves are saying the same thing, which is that twenty dollars is the mass-market price and everything else is positioning.

The meta-pattern I want to put down before I forget it is that the twenty-dollar anchor has done more than just compress pricing, it has compressed what each tool is allowed to be. Cursor's twenty-dollar Pro tier, ChatGPT Plus at twenty, Claude Pro at twenty, GitHub Copilot at ten, Perplexity Pro at twenty, they are all basically selling the same bundle of model access, a project workspace, and a polite amount of agent runtime. The differentiation has migrated out of the price column and into the integration column. Cursor wins on IDE hooks, ChatGPT wins on ecosystem breadth, Claude wins on coding and long-context, Perplexity wins on retrieval, and the price does not move. I am a little skeptical that this stays stable for another year, because the two-hundred-dollar ChatGPT Pro tier and the forty-dollar Grok tier are testing whether the anchor holds when someone has the distribution to ignore it, and I think at least one of those experiments is going to land.

Honestly I think the practical advice here is that if you are pricing-shopping AI tools in 2026, you are optimizing the wrong variable. The twenty-dollar band means the price difference between the top three or four assistants is noise compared to the workflow cost of switching. I have not stress-tested the two-hundred-dollar Pro tier the way I have with the standard ChatGPT Plus, so I want to actually run it for a quarter before I decide if the deep-research quota is worth the ten-x markup, and I have not stress-tested Grok's higher tiers at all, but the fact that the Juejin pricing guides keep landing on twenty dollars as the gravitational center tells me the real decision is which workflow you want to lock into, not which subscription saves you three dollars a month. The mid-tier tools that try to undercut at fifteen or ten are mostly losing the value comparison now, and the tools that try to charge forty or more are betting that integration or distribution is worth the premium. That is the whole market in one paragraph, and I am comfortable defending it.

I will reassess in three months. The last time I said that I was on ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, and Cursor Pro, which is still where I land. What has changed is that I now read the twenty-dollar number as a structural feature of the market rather than a coincidence, and I think that frame is going to age well. Give it six months and I expect either Grok to retreat back toward twenty or ChatGPT Pro to pick up enough enterprise customers to justify the two-hundred-dollar price, and whichever one moves first will tell the rest of the market whether the anchor holds.

Why the December 2025 AI IDE Rankings Are Scoring the Wrong Category

ninghonggang — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 11:07:30 +0000

I spent the morning reading two December 2025 Juejin AI IDE ranking posts back to back, and the thing that finally crystallized for me is that the Chinese-language AI IDE roundups are still scoring the same eight or nine autocomplete-first tools, while the actual market has moved on to Cursor, Claude Code, and the agent runtime layer, and almost nobody is calling out the gap. The first list scored Tencent CodeBuddy at 9.6, Sourcegraph Cody at 8.2, Replit Ghostwriter at 8.0, Codeium at 7.8, Tabnine at 7.6, Amazon CodeWhisperer at 7.5, JetBrains AI Assistant at 7.4, Blackbox at 7.2. The second list was nearly identical, with the only real difference being that they swapped CodiumAI in for Tencent CodeBuddy and called it a nine-tool ranking. Seven of the names appeared in both, with the same scores to the decimal, which is the part that has been rattling around in my head all morning.

The piece that pushed me over the edge was noticing that almost none of the eight tools showing up in both rankings are tools I have heard any of my English-speaking colleagues mention in the last six months. Cursor has eaten the dev mindshare on Twitter and dev.to. Claude Code has eaten the engineering-team mindshare on Hacker News and Reddit. GitHub Copilot is still the default for the average bootcamp graduate, sure, but the conversation in 2026 is about agent runtimes, not autocomplete-with-chat. To be fair CodeBuddy and Sourcegraph Cody are real products with real users, and I am taking the 9.6 score column with a grain of salt because the post that gave it that number was transparently written by a CodeBuddy advocate, but the shape of the list is the part that matters. The Chinese-language IDE rankings are scoring a 2024 product category, and the roundup format is doing a poor job of reflecting where the engineers I know are actually spending money.

The meta-pattern I want to put down before I forget it is that there is now a visible gap between what the consumer-facing AI IDE roundups are scoring and what the GitHub trending recaps are surfacing, and the gap is getting wider, not narrower. The two December 2025 IDE rankings spent most of their column space on autocomplete latency, response speed, and the standard enterprise-feature checklist of SSO and SOC2 compliance. The April and October 2025 GitHub trending recaps surfaced Agent-S for GUI automation, Graphiti for memory graphs, supermemory for persistent context, FastMCP for plugin frameworks, claude-cookbooks as the Anthropic reference, and most recently AGENTS.md as a proposed standard for handing project context to AI coding agents. None of those are autocomplete tools. None of them are in either of the two Juejin IDE rankings. I am a little skeptical of any AI IDE ranking that scores tools on the 2024 axis and ignores the 2026 axis, because the engineers picking tools right now are not buying autocomplete with chat. They are buying agent runtimes that can call into a memory layer and write to a structured project context file.

Honestly I think the practical takeaway here is that if you are reading a Chinese-language AI IDE ranking to decide what to pay for in 2026, you are reading the wrong document. The Chinese roundups are still useful for tracking the domestic-only products like Tencent CodeBuddy and the Chinese versions of CodeWhisperer, and they are fine for getting a read on enterprise procurement preferences in the Asia-Pacific region. But for the question of which IDE you should be coding in tomorrow, the answer is almost certainly going to come from the GitHub trending recaps and the English-language reviews of Cursor and Claude Code, not from a list that scored Codeium at 7.8 in December 2025 and has not been updated since. I have not stress-tested CodeBuddy or Cody the way I have with Cursor and Claude Code, so I want to actually run them for a quarter before I oversell or undersell them, but the fact that two separate Chinese-language rankings produced the same seven-tool overlap with the same decimal scores tells me the roundup format itself is being copy-pasted rather than written from scratch, and that is a problem I want to call out before more people make tooling decisions based on it.

I will reassess in three months. The last time I said that I was mostly bouncing between Cursor and Claude Code for coding and ChatGPT for everything else, which is still roughly where I land. What has changed is that I now treat the GitHub trending recaps as the source of truth for what to pay attention to, and the Juejin IDE roundups as a lagging indicator for the Asia-Pacific enterprise market specifically, and I think that split is going to age well. Give it six months and I expect the Chinese-language roundups to start including Cursor and Claude Code and the agent runtime repos in their lists, and when that happens I will know the format has finally caught up with the market.

The open-source AI platform category that nobody is naming yet

ninghonggang — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 11:08:37 +0000

I went down a rabbit hole this morning reading the late-2025 and early-2026 Juejin open-source AI platform roundups back to back, and the thing that finally crystallized for me is that a fourth category of AI tooling has quietly formed alongside the IDEs, the chat assistants, and the consumer agents, and almost none of the English-language roundups are naming it. The Chinese AI tool list calls it the 开源 AI 平台 stack — BuildingAI, Coze, Dify, FastGPT, the n8n-style workflow engines, plus the agent-framework pieces like Agent-S and supermemory from the GitHub trending lists. These are not chatbots. They are not IDE plugins. They are the do-it-yourself layer where a team wires together a model, a vector store, a tool registry, and a workflow editor and ships an internal product in a week. I would not have written that sentence six months ago, and I want to put it down somewhere I can find it.

The piece that pushed me over the edge was the 2026 BuildingAI versus Dify versus n8n versus Coze comparison post, which scored BuildingAI highest on commercial viability and private deployment, Dify highest on visual workflow ergonomics, Coze highest on template breadth and the byte-dance ecosystem, and n8n highest on cross-system glue. To be fair the post was written by a BuildingAI advocate, so I am taking the score column with a grain of salt, but the shape of the comparison was the part that has been rattling around in my head all morning. Four products, all open-source, all pitched at the same job — let a small team assemble an AI application without writing the orchestration code from scratch — and not one of them was on my radar twelve months ago. Agent-S from Simular AI, supermemory, mem0, Graphiti, and TradingAgents-CN showed up in the GitHub trending lists the same year, and they all do different things, but they all sit downstream of this same do-it-yourself layer.

The meta-pattern I want to put down before I forget it is that the open-source AI platform category is where the agent-runtime vertical actually lives, and the Juejin roundups have been tracking it more honestly than the English-language ones. The April and October 2025 GitHub trending recaps surfaced Agent-S for GUI automation, Graphiti for memory graphs, supermemory for persistent context, mem0 for long-term recall, and FastMCP for plugin frameworks, and almost every one of those repos assumes you are going to plug it into a Dify or a Coze or a custom FastAPI wrapper rather than build the orchestration yourself. I am a little skeptical of any "best AI tools" list that stops at Cursor and ChatGPT, because the actual interesting action for a backend engineer in 2026 is one layer down, in the agent orchestration layer where open-source has eaten the closed-source lead.

Honestly I think the practical advice here is that the question "should I build with an open-source AI platform or pay for a hosted one" is no longer really a build-versus-buy question. It is a deployment question. BuildingAI positions itself as private-deployment-first, Dify positions itself as visual-workflow-first, Coze leans on the byte-dance ecosystem for templates, and n8n leans on cross-system integration. I have not stress-tested any of them the way I have with Cursor and Claude Code, so I want to actually run them for a quarter before I oversell or undersell them, but the fact that the category exists at all, and that four serious competitors showed up in the same Juejin roundup, tells me the do-it-yourself layer has matured past the prototype stage and into the ship-it stage. The hosted-agent products from OpenAI and Anthropic are still better for the ninety-percent case, but the ten-percent case is now a real option.

I will reassess in three months. The last time I said that I was mostly bouncing between Cursor and Claude Code for coding and ChatGPT for everything else, which is still roughly where I land. What has changed is that I now keep Dify and Coze on the bookmarks bar the way I kept LangChain on it two years ago, and I think that shift is going to age well. Give it a year and one of these four will probably be the default do-it-yourself layer the way LangChain was the default prototype layer, and the other three will be the niches.

GitHub Trending 2025: The Agent Runtime Vertical Nobody Is Talking About

ninghonggang — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 11:05:44 +0000

I went down a rabbit hole this morning reading the April and October 2025 Juejin GitHub trending roundups back to back, and the thing that finally crystallized for me is that an entire vertical of AI agent infrastructure has been building on GitHub all year, and almost none of the consumer AI tool roundups are talking about it. The Juejin posts on best AI tools of 2025 and the December 2025 IDE rankings keep putting Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and v0 on the same axis, but the GitHub trending posts from April and October keep surfacing a totally different category of tooling — Agent-S from Simular AI for GUI automation, Graphiti from Zep AI for memory graphs, supermemory for persistent context, FastMCP for plugin frameworks, and TradingAgents-CN for multi-agent financial workflows. These tools do not compete with Cursor. They compete with each other for the role of agent runtime. I would not have written that sentence six months ago, and I want to put it down somewhere I can find it.

The piece that pushed me over the edge was the April 2025 GitHub trending recap, which led with cursor-free-vip — a tool for bypassing Cursor Pro, which is itself a fascinating signal about willingness to pay that I will come back to — and then listed Agent-S, FastMCP, Graphiti, and supermemory in the same top ten. To be fair I had heard of Graphiti and supermemory before, but I had not internalized that they were trending in the same month alongside GUI-agent and plugin-framework tooling, which told me there was a coherent vertical forming rather than four unrelated repos having a good month. The October 2025 list doubled down. Agent-S appeared again, claude-cookbooks showed up as the de facto Anthropic cookbook, supermemory was still in the rotation, and TradingAgents-CN was the financial-agent entry. Same vertical, same kind of tooling, six months apart. Honestly I am not sure if this is a vertical yet or just a hot category, but the consistency across two separate list snapshots is enough for me to treat it as a real pattern.

The meta-pattern I want to put down before I forget it is that the consumer AI tool roundups and the GitHub trending roundups are answering different questions, and I think most readers are reading only one of them. The consumer roundups answer which AI tool should I pay for today. The GitHub trending roundups answer what is the open-source agent stack actually shipping in 2025. The two are not in conflict, they are just orthogonal. Cursor and Claude Code are the IDEs that engineers use to write code. Agent-S, Graphiti, FastMCP, and supermemory are the runtime infrastructure that those IDEs, and the agents they spawn, call into when the task is do this thing on my computer or remember this across sessions. I am a little skeptical of any single AI tool roundup that does not mention the runtime layer, because the IDE without the runtime is a code editor with autocomplete and nothing else.

What I think this means practically, at least for me, is that I have started reading the GitHub trending recaps as the leading indicator and the consumer roundups as the lagging one. The consumer lists tell me what engineers are paying for. The GitHub trending lists tell me what engineers are building on, and what they will be paying for in twelve to eighteen months when the runtime layer stabilizes into products. I have not stress-tested Agent-S or supermemory myself the way I have with Cursor and Claude Code, so I want to actually run them for a quarter before I oversell or undersell them, but the fact that the same vertical keeps trending across two separate 2025 snapshots is enough for me to bookmark the category. The cursor-free-vip entry, for what it is worth, is the cleanest evidence I have read this year that the willingness-to-pay ceiling is lower than the headline pricing implies.

I will reassess in three months. The last time I said that I was bouncing between Cursor and Claude Code for coding and ChatGPT for everything else, which is still roughly where I land. What has changed is that I now read the GitHub trending recaps as seriously as I read the consumer roundups, and I think that shift is going to age well. Give it a year and the agent-runtime vertical will probably have a Cursor of its own.

Why every AI tool costs twenty dollars a month now

ninghonggang — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 11:05:52 +0000

I went down a rabbit hole this morning reading the late-2025 Juejin AI pricing guides back to back, and the thing that finally crystallized for me is that the entire AI tool industry has quietly converged on a twenty-dollar-a-month price ceiling, and almost nobody is talking about it as the story it actually is. ChatGPT Plus at twenty dollars. Claude Pro at twenty. Google AI Pro at 19.99, which honestly might as well be twenty. Cursor at twenty. GitHub Copilot at ten for the basic plan but twenty for the Pro tier that most teams I know actually use. Midjourney at thirty, which is the only serious outlier above the line, and even they offer a ten-dollar entry point. The two-hundred-dollar ChatGPT Pro tier exists but it is not the default for anyone I know who is not doing heavy research work, and the free fall in API pricing over the last year, ninety percent in some segments according to one of the Juejin pieces, has been pushing the consumer-tier subscriptions into line with each other in a way I had not really noticed until I read four pricing posts in one sitting.

The piece that pushed me over the edge was the 2025 AI tool pricing guide post, which laid out the math cleanly: Google AI Pro at 19.99 with a million-token context window and a student-tier free year, ChatGPT Plus at 20 with GPT-4o and the eighty-messages-per-three-hours cap, Claude Pro at 20 with five-times the usage of the free tier and Claude Code integration, and then a whole row of secondary players — Perplexity Pro at 20, Poe from 5 to 249.99, Midjourney at 10, 30, and 120, and Grok Premium Plus which apparently crept up to 40 dollars from 22. To be fair I have not stress-tested Grok the way I have with Cursor and Claude Code, so I want to actually run it for a quarter before I oversell or undersell it, but the shape of the recommendation is the part that has been rattling around in my head all morning. Every serious paid AI subscription on the market in 2026 is somewhere between ten and thirty dollars a month, and twenty is the gravitational center.

The meta-pattern I want to put down before I forget it is that the convergence on twenty dollars is not a coincidence, it is the result of a price war that finished while nobody was watching, and the Juejin pricing posts are the clearest evidence of it I have read. A year ago you had ChatGPT Plus at 20, Copilot at 10, and then a long tail of tools charging anywhere from 5 to 50 dollars with no obvious reason for the spread. Now the long tail has compressed. Perplexity Pro is at 20. Midjourney is 30 but only because the image generation market is still willing to pay a premium. The Chinese-language tools — DeepSeek, 通义灵码, Kimi, 智谱 GLM — are mostly free or near-free because the domestic market dynamics are different, but the international subscription products have all landed in the same place. I am a little skeptical of any list that promises a "complete" AI tool stack because the only complete stacks I trust are the ones engineers actually run for a quarter and rewrite, but the budget math for a working engineer in 2026 is now genuinely tractable: two paid tools at twenty each, one free fallback, and you are out the door for less than a Netflix-and-Spotify combo.

What I think this means practically, at least for me, is that the question of "which AI tool should I pay for" is no longer really a pricing question. It is a workflow question, and the fact that the prices have aligned has freed me up to actually think about which tool I want to be using rather than which one I can afford. The pricing guide post pointed out that annual subscriptions save ten to twenty percent, which matters less than it used to when the monthly number was all over the map, and that the platform ecosystem question — Google AI Pro includes 2TB of Google One storage, Microsoft Copilot Pro bundles with Office 365 — has become a more important factor than the headline subscription price. Honestly I think this is the right outcome. I would not have written that sentence a year ago, and I want to put it somewhere I can find it.

I will reassess in three months. The last time I said that I was mostly bouncing between Cursor and Claude Code for coding and ChatGPT for everything else, and that is still roughly where I land. What has changed is that I now treat the twenty-dollar price point as the default filter rather than the headline, and I think that shift is going to age well. Give it six months and this could look very different again if the API price compression finally shows up at the consumer tier, but for now twenty dollars a month is the answer for almost every serious AI tool on the market and I am done pretending the price was ever the hard part.

The persona-specific AI tool stack has quietly eaten the universal one

ninghonggang — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:06:01 +0000

I went down another rabbit hole this morning reading the late-2025 and early-2026 Juejin AI tool roundups back to back, and the thing that finally crystallized for me is that the persona-specific AI tool list has quietly eaten the generic AI tool list, and almost nobody is saying it out loud. The "best AI tools of 2025" or "AI tools you must learn in 2026" headline used to mean one thing and serve everyone. Now it means something different for front-end engineers, for students, for content creators, for Chinese-language workers, for people on the Alibaba stack, for privacy-conscious teams running local models through Ollama. Every single one of those lists is recommending a different four-tool combo, and honestly I think that is the right answer. I would not have written that sentence a year ago, and I want to put it down somewhere I can find it.

The piece that pushed me over the edge was the November 2025 front-end dev tool ranking, which laid out a clean four-tool stack — Cursor at twenty dollars a month for the IDE-native flow, GitHub Copilot at ten for the GitHub-everywhere default, Codeium free for autocomplete when billing is a pain, and V0.dev from Vercel for the text-to-UI moments. That list is genuinely useful for a front-end engineer starting fresh today. Then I scrolled to the 2026 front-end tool list from a different author, who recommended Copilot plus Phind for a beginner pair, then added Cursor once the workflow was steady, and said to expect to swap one of them out in the second month. Then the Chinese AI tool roundup from 2025 had DeepSeek and 通义灵码 and Kimi and 智谱 GLM as the obvious four, with ChatGPT and Claude as the optional extras. Then the content-creator list had Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus at twenty for writing, Midjourney at thirty for images, and Canva Pro at ten as the glue. To be fair every one of those lists had at least one tool I would not recommend, but the shape of every one of them was the same: pick two to four paid tools, expect to swap, keep one free fallback in rotation. The "one tool to rule them all" framing is gone, and I had not really noticed until I read four of these posts in one sitting.

The meta-pattern I want to put down before I forget it is that the right AI tool stack in 2026 is a personal stack, not a universal one, and the Juejin roundups are doing a better job of admitting that than the English-language roundups I read. The pricing guide post that ran around the same time pointed out that ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, and Google AI Pro all settle around twenty dollars a month, that Grok Premium Plus has crept up to forty, that the two-hundred-dollar ChatGPT Pro tier exists but is not the default for anyone who is not doing heavy research. The price ceiling for any single subscription is around twenty to thirty dollars, and the budget math for a working engineer is something like two paid tools plus one free fallback plus maybe one vertical-specific tool for the workflow that eats your week. I am a little skeptical of any "complete AI tool stack" list because the only complete stacks I trust are the ones engineers actually run for a quarter and rewrite, but the multi-tool model is winning over the one-tool model and the persona-specific lists are the clearest evidence of that I have read this year.

Honestly I think the practical advice is shifting under our feet. A year ago the smart move was to learn one general tool deeply and that is still the right starting point for someone new to all of this. But for anyone who has been using Cursor or Claude Code or ChatGPT for more than six months, the question is no longer "which AI tool should I pay for" but "which two, plus which free fallback, plus which vertical tool for the specific job that is eating my Tuesday." I have not stress-tested 通义灵码 or DeepSeek the way I have with Cursor or Claude Code, so I'd take direct comparisons with a grain of salt, but the fact that every Juejin roundup is now implicitly answering a different version of the same question tells me the era of the universal list is over. The era of the persona-specific list is here, and that is genuinely good news for readers who actually use the tools.

I will reassess in three months. The last time I said that I was mostly bouncing between Cursor and Claude Code for coding and ChatGPT for everything else, which is still roughly where I land. What has changed is that I now read the persona-specific lists as the default filter rather than the regional-curiosity filter, and I think that shift is going to age well. Give it six months and this could look very different again, but for now the multi-tool persona-specific stack is the answer and I am done pretending one list fits everyone.

The AI Tool Scorecard Is Dying, and the Case Study Is Taking Over

ninghonggang — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 11:05:04 +0000

I went down a rabbit hole this morning reading the December 2025 Juejin roundups back to back, and the thing that finally crystallized for me is that the "score out of ten with a star rating" AI tool review is quietly dying, and the long-form case study is taking its place. I would not have written that sentence six months ago, and I want to put it somewhere I can find it.

The piece that pushed me over the edge was the December 2025 "8款主流产品核心功能深度解析" post, which laid out a clean comparison matrix with CodeBuddy at 9.6 out of 10, JetBrains AI Assistant at 7.4, Replit Ghostwriter at 8.0, Codeium at 7.8, and a row of color-coded star ratings for security compliance, autonomous agents, multimodal support, and team collaboration. To be fair I read the whole table and I genuinely could not tell you how those numbers were derived. The latency column said "200ms级" for CodeBuddy, "中等" for Sourcegraph Cody, and "快" for the rest, which is not a benchmark, that is a vibe. I have not stress-tested CodeBuddy myself the way I have with Cursor and Claude Code, so I want to actually run it for a quarter before I oversell or undersell it, but the formatting tells you everything about the era. Eight tools, ten categories, one tidy matrix, and the only thing the reader actually learns is which tool the author wanted to put on top.

The contrast with the more honest roundups is doing all the work. The 2025 AI tool pricing guide post that ran around the same time laid out ChatGPT Plus at 20 dollars a month, Claude Pro at 20, Google AI Pro at 19.99, Grok Premium Plus at 40, Perplexity Pro at 20, Midjourney at 30, with annual discount math and student-tier callouts, and that post is the one I actually trust. It is opinionated but it shows its work. The same pattern shows up in the GitHub trending recaps from May, June, and October 2025, which mostly skip the scoring and just describe what each project does, what problem it solves, and where the friction is. Agent-S from Simular AI pushing on computer use. mem0 and supermemory pushing on persistent memory. winboat pushing on the Linux-Windows desktop bridge. The same kind of writeup, the same kind of "here is what I tried, here is where it surprised me, here is what is still rough," every month.

The meta-pattern that jumped out, and the one I want to put down before I forget it, is that the scoring-matrix review was a 2024 artifact that the AI tool ecosystem has outgrown. In 2024 there were fifteen serious AI coding tools, almost no production usage data, and a reader who genuinely needed a top-line opinion. In 2026 there are dozens of tools, real production telemetry, GitHub stars and trending pages, and a reader who has tried three of them already. I am a little skeptical of any roundup that puts CodeBuddy at 9.6 and JetBrains at 7.4 without showing the benchmark, because the only honest scores I trust are the ones the engineer actually shipped on a Tuesday afternoon. The 8-tool-10-category matrix format was useful when the category was new and the tools were all unproven. It is mostly noise now, and the Juejin December 2025 lists are showing the shift in real time.

What I think this means practically, at least for me, is that I have started reading the case study posts much more carefully than the scorecard posts. The writing-tool comparison that walked through 蛙蛙写作 versus ChatGPT versus Claude versus 文心一言 on the same Chinese-web-novel task told me more in three paragraphs than the eight-tool matrix did in three thousand words. The trading-agents post that compared TradingAgents-CN's multi-agent setup against a generic LLM for A-share analysis did the same thing in the financial domain. The same shift is showing up in the English-language roundups I read, where the ones that hold my attention are the long-form "I shipped production code with both of these, here is where each one broke" pieces, not the "X is the best AI IDE of 2026" clickbait. Honestly I think the scoring-matrix post still has a place for first-time buyers, but the second time you buy an AI tool, you want the case study.

I will reassess in three months, because that is the only honest timeline I can commit to. The last time I said that I was mostly bouncing between Cursor and Claude Code, which is still where I land for coding. What has changed is that I now actively skip the scoring-matrix roundups and reach for the case-study ones first, and I think that filter is going to age well. The December 2025 Juejin lists gave me enough evidence to commit to that.