So there I was at 2am, staring at a merge conflict from hell in a legacy codebase nobody wanted to touch. Three-way merge markers everywhere, and my brain had officially checked out around midnight. That's when I thought "screw it" and installed Cursor to see if the AI hype was real.
A week later, I've tried seven different AI coding assistants. Some were genuinely useful. Others felt like glorified autocomplete with a marketing budget.
The One That Actually Changed My Workflow
Cursor is basically VS Code with AI steroids. What sold me was the Cmd+K feature — you highlight any block of code, hit the shortcut, and tell it what you want in plain English. "Make this async" or "add error handling" actually works most of the time.
I used it to refactor a gnarly Express middleware stack into TypeScript. Instead of manually typing out every interface and return type, I'd select a function and ask it to convert. Saved maybe 2-3 hours on that PR alone. The codebase context is legitimately good — it reads your entire project and suggests imports without you asking.
Downside? It's $20/month after the trial, and sometimes it hallucinates method names that don't exist in your dependencies. You still need to read what it generates.
GitHub Copilot: The One Everyone's Heard Of
GitHub Copilot has been around long enough that half my team already uses it. The inline suggestions are solid for boilerplate — useState hooks, try-catch blocks, that kind of thing. I definitely type less when it's on.
But honestly? It feels like an advanced autocomplete. Great for writing tests (it's weirdly good at Jest assertions), but it won't architect a feature for you. I tried using it to build a Redis caching layer and it kept suggesting outdated ioredis patterns from 2019. Had to rewrite most of it anyway.
Also, the Chat feature in VS Code is kind of buried in the UI. I keep forgetting it exists.
Claude Code: The Conversational One
This one's different — it's not an IDE plugin, it's more like pair programming with an AI that can actually edit files. You chat with it in a sidebar, and it writes code directly into your project.
I used Claude to build a data migration script that needed to handle like six edge cases. Instead of writing it all myself, I described what I needed and it generated the whole thing — error handling, retry logic, the works. Then I asked it to add progress bars and it just... did.
Where it falls short: it's slower than inline tools like Copilot because you're having a conversation instead of getting instant suggestions. And if you're not specific about what you want, it'll write way more code than necessary.
The Rest of the Pack
Windsurf — tried it for about a day. It's similar to Cursor but the UX felt clunky. Maybe it's improved since, but I didn't stick with it long enough to find out.
Cody from Sourcegraph has good context awareness if you're working in a massive monorepo. I liked that it could search across repos to find example code. But the free tier has pretty restrictive limits, and I wasn't convinced enough to pay for another subscription.
Tabnine — I actually used this one before Copilot was a thing. It's fine for autocomplete, but it's been lapped by newer tools. The privacy-focused angle is cool if you're working on sensitive stuff, though.
ChatGPT for coding — I still use the web interface when I need to think through an algorithm or debug something weird. Copy-pasting code back and forth is tedious, but sometimes you just want to talk through a problem without an AI editing your files.
If you want side-by-side pricing and feature comparisons, OpenAI Tools Hub has reviews of 300+ AI tools including all of these.
What I Actually Keep Using
Two weeks later, I'm still paying for Cursor. The AI chat in the sidebar plus the instant refactoring shortcuts hit a sweet spot for me. I use GitHub Copilot on my work machine because my company already pays for it, and it's good enough for autocomplete.
I don't use any of the others daily. Maybe that'll change — this space moves fast. A month ago I'd never heard of half these tools.
The honest take? AI coding assistants won't replace you, but they're legitimately helpful for the boring parts. Boilerplate, refactoring, writing tests, converting between languages — that's where they shine. Architectural decisions and debugging production issues? Still your job.
If you're skeptical, just try the free trials. Cursor and Copilot both have them. Worst case you wasted 30 minutes. Best case you get a few hours of your life back every week.
Want a deeper breakdown? AI Coding Tools Compared: 7 Options Tested covers pricing, ratings, and use cases side by side.
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