Programmer Humor

Cursor and Claude Code are currently top tier.

GitHub Copilot is catching up, and at a $20/mo price point, it is one of the best ways to get started. Microsoft is slow rolling some of the delivery of features, because they can just steal the ideas from other projects that do it first. VScode also has extensions worth looking at: Cline and RooCode

Claude Code is better than just using Claude in cursor or copilot. Claude Code has next level magic that dispells some of the myths being propagated here about "ai bad at thing" because of the strong default prompts and validation they have built into it. You can say dumb human ignorant shit, and it will implicitly do a better job than others tools you give the same commands to.

To REALLY utilize claude code YOU MUST configure mcp tools... context7 is a critical one that avoids one of those footguns, "the model was trained on older versions of these libraries."

Cursor hosts models with their own secret sauce that improves their behavior. They hardforked VSCode to make a deeper integrated experience.

Avoid antigravity (google) and Kiro (Amazon). They don't offer enough value over the others right now.

If you already have an openai account, codex is worth trying, it's like Claude Code, but not as good.

JetBrains... not worth it for me.

Aider is an honorable mention.