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Aleksei Zagoskin
Aleksei Zagoskin

Posted on • Originally published at zagosk.in on

AI Coding Agent That Rocks 🚀

#ai #coding #programmingblogs #softwaredevelopment

(handwritten with ❤️ including emoji's and "—" (SHIFT+OPT+-))

It's been a while since my last post. A lot has happened, and its time to share some good stuff. To be honest, I missed writing 🙂 As always, we'll keep it dry and useful "TL;DR" style (aka shorts). Fasten your seat belt and lets go.

ℹ️ Disclaimer

  1. This post is based on my experiments, personal preferences, and conversations with other heavy AI users.

  2. If you have to use some other AI coding agent (e.g. due to license), it's perfectly fine. You can get A LOT from it (keep reading because many techniques are universal), and there are teams of brilliant minds behind every product which constantly improve their IDE's and tools.

  3. Nothing is ideal.

🤖 AI Coding Agents I Tried

  • GitHub Copilot;

  • Cursor;

  • Windsurf;

  • Claude Code;

  • JetBrains Junie;

  • Claude Desktop + DesktopCommander MCP (this wild combo deserves its own post).

👨🏻‍💻 Tech I Used Them On

  • C#/.NET, Web API

  • Node.js;

  • Golang;

  • CosmosDB, MongoDB;

  • Azure, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean;

  • GitHub Actions pipelines.

🏆 My Favorite

Over the last year (or even more?), I tried them all, watched the videos, read the docs, bought and cancelled subscriptions and, most importantly, shipped production code and solved non-trivial architectural problems with AI.

🔥 Claude Code has been the best — by a wide margin — for me. So if you haven't tried it, yet, don't wait — go ahead and install it right now (no, Anthropic doesn't pay me for this).

⚠️ Important: don't use API-key (pay-as-you-go) billing. Get Anthropic Pro subscription (around $20), and you'll save up a fair bit of money. If you end up doing heavy development, switch to Max.

🚀 Why It Works

  1. Its fast. Like... actually fast.

  2. It lives in Terminal + plug-ins for our favorite IDE's. Dont be afraid, you'll like it even if you're not a Terminal ninja.

  3. Strong project awareness. It understands your repo and context very well.

  4. You can easily "attach" extra directories to an opened project. E.g. when you work on a front-end project and need something from the backend. Another example would be opening multiple microservices (different repos).

  5. It's easy to control reasoning with special words think, think harder, ultrathink (yes, it is ultrathink 🧠).

  6. Its pretty stable (subjectively steadier than some alternatives).

  7. Sub-agents for specific tasks. Claude Code even can run them in parallel when it makes sense.

  8. Custom slash commands. Like your own shortcuts for repeatable operations.

  9. GitHub Integration. It can live on your GitHub (done in ~2 minutes) and reply to comments, make code changes (push commits), and even convert issues into PRs.

  10. Planning mode. Super useful for larger tasks.

Of course, this list is not complete. For more, see https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/overview.

🎬 The End

If you haven't tried Claude Code, now's a good time.

And remember, choosing the right tool is just the beginning. Similar to computer languages it's not enough just to pick a programming language and start coding. To get the best results you have to master it (and it takes time). I'll share some advanced techniques and tips in the next post(s).

That's it for now. Thanks for reading and stay tuned ❤️

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