AI Tools That Actually Work
Cut through the hype and discover AI coding tools that genuinely improve your workflow. Real reviews from real developers, not marketing fluff.
Build With Taste
Learn the difference between code that works and code that delights. Practical insights on creating software that users actually want to use.
Beyond Just Coding
Explore the intersection of technical skill and creative vision. How to use AI as a tool while keeping your unique developer voice.
Featured AI Coding Tools
IDEs
Zed
An open-source, high-performance code editor built from the ground up in Rust. It prioritizes speed, low latency, and native real-time collaboration. It integrates agentic AI editing and offers flexibility with BYOK and local LLM support.
Cursor
An 'AI-first' code editor, forked from VS Code, designed to be highly productive. It integrates agentic workflows for complex, multi-file tasks and features deep codebase awareness for context-aware chat and 'magical' predictive editing.
Windsurf
An enterprise-focused, agentic IDE built on VS Code. Its flagship 'Cascade' engine is designed to execute complex, multi-step tasks by leveraging deep codebase understanding and real-time awareness of developer actions. Now partnered with Cognition (creators of Devin).
Visual Studio Code
Microsoft's free, open-source code editor that has become the industry standard. It features extensive extension support, integrated terminal, debugging capabilities, and Git integration. Highly customizable and supports virtually every programming language.
CLI
sst/opencode (OpenCode)
A 100% open-source and 'provider-agnostic' CLI agent. Its core philosophy is developer freedom, supporting over 75 LLM providers (including local models) in a 'Bring Your Own Key' model. It features a responsive TUI and deep LSP integration.
Gemini CLI
Google's open-source AI agent for the terminal, leveraging the Gemini models. It can edit large codebases, supports multimodal input, and uses Google Search to ground its responses. Notable for its extremely generous free tier.
Claude Code
Anthropic's flagship programming agent, powered by the Claude 3.5 Opus model. It excels at understanding project-wide context and handling complex, multi-step tasks, showing changes as a diff in the IDE before applying.
Charm Crush CLI
An open-source AI coding agent developed by Charmbracelet, designed to operate directly within the terminal. It functions as a coding assistant, enabling users to interact with various Large Language Models (LLMs) for tasks such as writing and debugging code.
Plugin/Extensions
Kilo Code
A free and open-source VSCode extension that merges features from Roo Code and Cline. It offers multiple operational modes and doesn't require users to bring their own API keys.
Roo Code
An open-source, highly customizable VSCode extension that allows for direct file manipulation and terminal command execution. It's flexible with AI models but can be expensive due to high token consumption.
Cline
An open-source, 'bring-your-own-key' VSCode extension that offers a high degree of transparency and control. It supports various AI models and can execute terminal commands and browser actions.
Coding Models
GPT-5
OpenAI's latest flagship model, featuring a smart router that automatically selects between a fast model for simple tasks and a deep reasoning model for complex problems. It boasts state-of-the-art performance in coding, math, and writing, with a 272k token context window.
Gemini 2.5 Pro
Google's 'thinking model' with advanced reasoning and native multimodality. It supports a 1 million token context window and excels at complex problem-solving, coding, and generating nuanced audio outputs. 'Deep Think' mode allows for parallel thinking to tackle difficult tasks.
Qwen3 Coder
A series of open-source, agentic code models from Alibaba Cloud. Available in multiple sizes, it supports a 256k token context length (extendable to 1M) and excels at tool-calling and multi-turn interactions. It's designed for deep integration with various coding agents and IDEs.
Kimi K2
An open-weight, 1-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model from Moonshot AI. It's designed for agentic intelligence, with strong performance in coding, tool use, and autonomous problem-solving. It supports a 128k token context window and is available on Hugging Face.