Most developers now run two or three AI coding tools side by side rather than picking one. The hard part was never adding a tool — it's knowing when to reach for which one, and, increasingly, how much to trust what any of them hand back.
The workflow that actually holds up
A practical split that shows up repeatedly across solo and team setups:
- Cursor or Windsurf for multi-file feature work and agent-driven edits
- GitHub Copilot for fast inline completions while typing
- Claude Code, terminal-based, for the reasoning-heavy stuff — planning a migration, tracing a bug across files, explaining code you didn't write
- Tabnine where the deciding factor is "code never leaves our network," not raw capability
None of that is exotic. The mistake is running two inline-completion engines at once (Copilot + Tabnine fighting over the same Tab key is a real, reproducible headache) or reaching for a heavyweight agent to rename a variable your fingers could fix in two seconds.
The gap: reviewing what the AI actually wrote
Here's the part that gets skipped once the workflow is in place. Developers are now routinely asking a harder question than "which tool should write this": how do I efficiently review AI-generated code — especially across multiple worktrees — and can I actually trust automated review bots like Copilot's own review feature or CodeRabbit to catch what matters?
There's no clean answer yet. Automated review bots are useful first passes — they catch the obvious stuff fast — but they're trained to flag patterns, not to understand why your team made a specific tradeoff three files away. Treat a green check from a review bot as "nothing obviously wrong," not "safe to merge." The habit that actually holds up: run your own test suite after every AI-generated change, and reserve a human's attention specifically for security-sensitive code — auth, authorization, input validation, anything touching SQL — regardless of what the bot said.
Across multiple worktrees, the practical move is boring but effective: review one worktree's diff completely before switching context to the next, rather than skimming several in parallel. AI-generated changes read fine at a glance and fall apart on the third read; splitting attention across worktrees is exactly how the third read never happens.
One number on the page that was wrong
While checking this for accuracy: Windsurf's listed price of $15/month is stale. Windsurf was acquired by Cognition and rebranded to Devin Desktop as of June 2026 — same product lineage, new name — and current pricing is Pro $20/month, with a new Max tier at $200/month that didn't exist under the old plan structure. If you're comparing costs from an older bookmark or a cached comparison page, re-check the number before you budget against it.
The actual takeaway
Pick your tools by task, not by habit. Then treat "the AI wrote it and a bot approved it" as the start of review, not the end of it — particularly on anything a worktree full of AI-generated diffs makes easy to skim past.
Full workflow breakdown, cost table, and tool-by-tool setup guides: https://devtoolsreview.com/tutorials/ai-coding-tools-workflow/
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