I Tried 50 AI Coding Tools. Here's What Actually Works.

Let me save you some time. I've spent the last six months bouncing between AI coding assistants, and here's the honest truth: most of them do roughly the same thing, and the differences that matter aren't the ones you'd expect.

The ones I actually kept installed

Cursor is the one that stuck. Not because it writes better code than Copilot — it doesn't always — but because the editor is built around AI from the ground up. The tab-completion feels natural, and Cmd+K to edit inline is something I now reach for instinctively. Going back to VS Code feels like switching from an automatic to a stick shift.

GitHub Copilot is still the safe choice if you're in VS Code and don't want to switch editors. The completions are fast and the chat has gotten significantly better. It won't blow your mind, but it won't let you down either.

Claude Code surprised me. Running an AI agent in the terminal felt gimmicky at first, but for larger refactors — renaming across files, adding a new feature that touches multiple modules — it's genuinely faster than doing it by hand. I use it for the messy stuff I'd normally procrastinate on.

The overhyped ones

I'm not going to name names, but if a tool's landing page has more buzzwords than code examples, that's your red flag. Several tools I tested could generate impressive-looking demos but fell apart on real codebases with actual complexity.

The pattern I noticed: tools that work great on a blank file struggle with a 50,000-line monorepo. Context matters more than raw generation quality.

What actually matters when choosing

After all this testing, the things that make or break an AI coding tool are:

1. Context window — Can it understand your whole file? Your whole project? This is the single biggest differentiator.
2. Speed — If completions take more than 500ms, you'll turn them off within a week.
3. Integration — Does it work where you already work? Switching editors for marginal gains isn't worth it for most people.
4. Error rate — A tool that's right 70% of the time but confidently wrong the other 30% is worse than no tool at all.

My setup right now

Cursor for daily coding. Claude Code for big refactors and multi-file changes. Copilot on my work laptop because corporate IT hasn't approved anything else. That covers about 95% of what I need.

The remaining 5%? I just write the code myself. Sometimes that's still the fastest option.