Let me save you some time: AI coding assistants are legitimately useful now. Not “maybe helpful sometimes” useful—actually, genuinely, “I can’t imagine going back” useful.

But here’s the thing. The marketing for all of them sounds identical. “10x productivity!” “Write code in seconds!” “Your AI pair programmer!” After a while it all blurs together.

So I did something stupid. I spent the last few months actually using all the major options for real projects. Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, some Go. Web apps, scripts, data processing. Real code for real work.

Here’s what I learned.

The One Most Developers Should Start With

GitHub Copilot. There, I said it.

It’s not the cheapest. It’s not the most innovative. It’s not even the best at any single thing. But it’s the most reliable, and for something you’re going to use every single day, reliability matters more than anything else.

At $10/month for individuals (free if you’re a student or open source maintainer), it just works. The suggestions are good. The integration with VS Code is seamless. When it screws up—and it will—the screwups are usually obvious and easy to catch.

Is there anything better? Sometimes. But if you want to pick one thing and stop thinking about it, Copilot is the safe choice.

The One That Changed How I Think About Coding

Cursor isn’t just a coding assistant. It’s an entirely new IDE built around AI from the ground up.

And honestly? It took me a week to get it. At first I thought, “Why would I switch from VS Code for this?” The answer became clear when I used Composer for the first time.

Composer lets you make changes across multiple files by just describing what you want. “Refactor the authentication to use JWT instead of sessions.” And it… does it. Touches the right files. Updates the imports. Handles the edge cases you forgot about.

The catch: it’s $20/month, you have to switch IDEs, and there’s a real learning curve. This isn’t for everyone. But if you’re the kind of developer who gets excited about new tools—you should at least try it.

The One That’s Actually Free (And Good)

Codeium doesn’t get enough credit.

It’s free for individuals. Actually free, not “free trial” or “free with limitations.” The autocomplete is good—not quite Copilot level, but close enough that most developers wouldn’t notice the difference in daily use.

There’s a catch, though. The chat feature (where you can ask questions and get explanations) is pretty basic compared to Copilot Chat or Cursor. If autocomplete is all you need, Codeium is a no-brainer. If you want the full “AI pair programmer” experience, you’ll probably outgrow it.

The One For AWS People

If you live in AWS, Amazon CodeWhisperer knows things the others don’t.

Ask it to write a Lambda function, and it actually understands the Lambda context. Generate IAM policies? It gets the syntax right. S3 operations, DynamoDB queries, CloudFormation templates—it’s trained on this stuff and it shows.

Outside of AWS? It’s fine. Just fine. But in the AWS ecosystem, it’s legitimately better than the alternatives.

The One For Paranoid People (And Enterprises)

Tabnine lets you run everything locally. Your code never leaves your machine.

For most of us, this doesn’t matter. But if you work at a company with strict data policies, or you’re working on something genuinely sensitive, or you’re just philosophically opposed to sending code to someone else’s servers—Tabnine is the only real option.

The quality is slightly worse than the cloud-based alternatives. That’s the tradeoff. You get privacy; you lose some accuracy.

What I Actually Use

My daily setup right now:

• Cursor for anything complex or when I’m working on unfamiliar codebases
• GitHub Copilot in VS Code for quick scripts and one-off tasks
• Codeium on my personal laptop because it’s free and good enough for side projects

Yes, that’s three different tools. Am I overthinking this? Probably. But they’re each best at different things.

The Stuff That Surprised Me

Tab-Completion Is Just The Beginning

When I started, I thought AI coding assistants were basically fancy autocomplete. And yeah, that’s part of it. But the real power is in the chat interfaces and the ability to explain code.

Last week I was debugging a race condition in some async JavaScript. I highlighted the code, asked Copilot Chat what could cause a race condition, and it immediately pointed to the exact line where I wasn’t awaiting properly. I’d been staring at that code for an hour.

They Make You Lazy (In Good And Bad Ways)

Good lazy: I no longer write boilerplate. Tests, documentation, config files—all generated. This is unambiguously great.

Bad lazy: I sometimes accept suggestions without really reading them. Then I spend 20 minutes debugging code I didn’t write and don’t understand. The fix is obvious—read before you accept—but the temptation to just hit Tab is real.

Comments Are Magic

All of these tools are significantly better when you write clear comments first. “Function that takes a user ID and returns their full order history sorted by date” gets you much better code than just typing function getOrders.

This changed how I code. I think in comments now, then let the AI fill in the implementation. My code is actually more documented than it was before, which is an unexpected benefit.

The Honest Truth

Here it is: Any of the top options will make you more productive. The differences between them are smaller than the marketing suggests.

If you’re not using any AI coding tool right now, you’re giving up a real competitive advantage. Pick Copilot if you want easy. Pick Cursor if you want cutting-edge. Pick Codeium if you want free.

But pick something. The gap between “using AI tools” and “not using AI tools” is bigger than the gap between any two tools.

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This changes fast. I’ll update when the landscape shifts.