Coding AI tools,
checked and ranked

Choosing an AI coding assistant

AI coding tools now come in three shapes: completion inside your editor, a chat window you paste into, and an agent that edits files and runs commands on its own. They suit different work. Completion pays off constantly on familiar code; an agent pays off on mechanical changes across many files; chat is what you want when the real task is understanding something.

The measure that matters is not how much code a tool writes but how much of it you keep. An AI code generator that produces a plausible-looking function in a library it half-remembers costs more time than it saves. Judge one on a codebase you know well, where you can see immediately when it is guessing.