6 Best AI Coding Assistants for Different Workflows

You sure have heard it, it has been repeated countless times in the last few weeks, even from some luminaries of the developers world: "AI coding makes you 10x more productive and if you don't use it you will be left behind". Sounds ominous right? Well, one of the biggest promoters of AI assisted coding has just put a stop to the hype and FOMO. Anthropic has published a paper that concludes:

* There is no significant speed up in development by using AI assisted coding. This is partly because composing prompts and giving context to the LLM takes a lot of time, sometimes comparable as writing the code manually.

* AI assisted coding significantly lowers the comprehension of the codebase and impairs developers grow. Developers who rely more on AI perform worst at debugging, conceptual understanding and code reading.

This seems to contradict the massive push that has occurred in the last weeks, where people are saying that AI speeds them up massively(some claiming a 100x boost) and that there is no downsides to this. Some even claim that they don't read the generated code and that software engineering is dead. Other people advocating this type of AI assisted development says "You just have to review the generated code" but it appears that just reviewing the code gives you at best a "flimsy understanding" of the codebase, which significantly reduces your ability to debug any problem that arises in the future, and stunts your abilities as a developer and problem solver, without delivering significant efficiency gains.

Link to the paper:

... it needs to be something your company is paying for. im not understanding. if your company is paying use a company paid codex plan, or claude code.

Your company will probably not be happy if they find out you send their source code to some other AI provider that is not their company GitHub Copilot. Be careful with using some random personal subscription for company work, it may come back to bite you. It would really be better to talk to your manager about needing more budget rather than going rogue.

Personally, I don't, I just do everything manually and write code old school again and in every standup I mention "Would be done, but ran out of ghcopilot usage and it doesn't reset for another 18 days so the story points on all these cards x20'd."

If I'm hitting usage, so is everyone else.

The company needs to have driven into it a CLEAR picture of what $300 caps does to their velocity. And that paying $1000 or even $2000 a month for AI usuage per developer is far cheaper than hiring more developers and paying them health insurance and pto balances.

I would argue that even if it costs $10,000 a month, if it enables me to handle the workflow of 3 architects, it's still cheaper than hiring 2 more.

I’ve been having a lot of success with $20 codex plan. I just let codex loose in the game directory and it works (with guidance of course). I even started in godot/gdscript and then switched to Unity and it handled all the migration for me.

For 100% private, turn off external telemetry for your coding agents and host your own LLMs. vLLM, LM Studio, llama.cpp, ollama, etc all can be used.

Need some genuine advice.
At my company, we’re limited to $300 worth of AI tokens per month of Github copilot. We have only github copilot option in company. Earlier, we had an option to extend the limit, but that’s no longer available, so we have to manage within the $300 budget.
I’m a full-stack developer, and AI has become a major part of my development workflow — understanding the codebase, implementing features, debugging, writing/refactoring code, reviewing PRs, etc. With the amount of work we have, going back to writing everything manually would be extremely difficult.
I’m looking for good alternatives once the company-provided AI quota is exhausted. I’m also okay with paying from my own pocket, as long as it’s reasonably priced. Ideally, I’d prefer something with very high or no practical usage limits.
I tried a Codex subscription, but since I had to log in using my personal account on my office machine/repository, I wasn’t comfortable using it for company code, so I stopped.
What are other developers in a similar situation using?
I’m open to:
Local LLMs
Paid coding assistants
API-based solutions
VS Code extensions/agents
Any other setup that works well for full-stack development
My main requirements are good coding capability, high usage limits, reasonable cost, and preferably something that can be used safely with company code.
Would really appreciate genuine recommendations from people who have actually used these tools.

Note : iIf you guys are not using any AI For coding and manually doing it , that’s great. But please don’t advise to stop using AI as it is not possible for us to stop using it.

Hi everyone,

I’m an embedded systems enthusiast with experience working on projects using Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and microcontrollers. I have basic Python skills and a moderate understanding of C, C++, and C#, but I’m not a full-time software developer. I have an idea for a project that is heavily software-focused and quite complex, and I want to build at least a prototype to demonstrate its capabilities in the real world, mostly working on embedded platforms but requiring significant coding effort.

My main questions are:

• Which AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or others are best suited to help someone like me develop complex software from scratch?
• Can these AI assistants realistically support a project of this scale, including architectural design, coding, debugging, and iteration?
• Are there recommended workflows or strategies to effectively use these AI tools to compensate for my limited coding background?
• If it’s not feasible to rely on AI tools alone, what are alternative approaches to quickly build a functional prototype of a software-heavy embedded system?

I appreciate any advice, recommendations for specific AI tools, or general guidance on how to approach this challenge.

Thanks in advance!

I take it you are using the most powerful models for pretty much everything, right? You should start using Luna for things that are not super complex. Luna is a very capable model and is extremely cheap. Using it all day usually just costs me a dollar or two. You could either continue to use the most powerful models for everything and monitor your credits so that you know when you only have a couple bucks a day for the rest of the sprint and need to switch to Luna, or you could figure out when Luna is sufficient for each prompt.

Hi fellow AI-assisted game devs!

I’m a full-time software engineer diving into game development on the side. Since I already have a solid background in code and system architecture, I don't really need an AI to hold my hand through the structural planning—I can handle the architecture and feature design just fine.

However, AI speeds up the actual typing and syntax so much that I'd rather not spend hours memorizing language-specific quirks (currently learning Godot/GDScript). I usually let the AI draft the code and I just step in to correct it when it goes off the rails.

I recently started my first simple Godot project using GitHub Copilot in VS Code (with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which was working perfectly for me). But with Copilot's brand-new transition to usage-based AI Credits, at work I’m burning through my limits way too fast already.

So, I’m looking for alternatives for my game dev.

What AI subscription do you recommend right now?

My criteria:

Budget: $10 to $20 a month.

No fluff: I don’t need art generation (I buy assets to skip that hassle) or bloated multi-agent features that try to write the whole game for me.

Efficiency: Just a reliable, fast model that handles code efficiently and allows a high volume of requests without hitting a sudden wall.

Any recommendations or setups that are working well for you? Thanks!

PS : I'll only take a month to try it out at first

What do you mean by “100% private” - legally or technically?

If you mean legally, GitHub Copilot and some other providers have enterprise plans where they promise your code won’t be used for AI training or anything else

If you mean technically private, then a local LLM is pretty much mandatory. Your agent harness can also have telemetry, so make sure you’re using an open-source one like OpenCode or Pi

I find it unlikely that a serious coding project will get much benefit from any vibe-coding bullshit.

Have you tried this crazy tool called Google?

Literally one search got me:

Companies like Amazon are not going to steal your "core algorithms or intellectual property" lol do you even have an idea of how much of a scandal it would be?

I wish I went to school to become a software engineer sometimes. Just actual coding knowledge with AI tools multiplier.

If you have any creativity and artistic sense you are going to kill it.

I started using Cursor about a year ago and stuck with it until December. I mainly dropped it when auto mode stopped being unlimited — that was a big part of my workflow for smaller tasks.

After that I switched to Antigravity and honestly it felt great for a while, but the recent changes to the Pro plan basically killed it for me. Right now it feels like it’s not very usable anymore.

So I’m back to looking for alternatives. If you only had around $20/month to spend, what would you go with today?

I’ve been considering Codex, Claude Code, Copilot, Windsurf, but I’m not sure which one actually delivers the best value right now. Open to other options too if I’m missing something.

I usually work on small tasks, but every now and then I need to handle changes that involve multiple files and more complex logic. And occasionally there are larger features or refactors that touch a big part of the codebase, so I’m looking for something that can handle both without slowing things down.

It's new technology, it's constantly changing, and frankly it's inconsistent. So no one can tell you what is the right approach to use long-term.

Codex 100%

Claude is okay if you know what you're doing and love to debug half your workflow. Codex is almost like a one button click and send. If you plan things right with Codex before tasks you most likely will spend very little time debugging

Claude is good if you want to work at a high level, but that costs more. Codex is good if you want to work at a detail level (directly specify algorithms, etc.) Codex will absolutely color outside the lines and hallucinate if you leave it space.

I also was bummed about Copilot, and moved to Claude Code for $20/month and it’s been great for me. I also have a software dev background and am using Godot, but I am trying to truly vibe code and not really trying to learn GDScript along the way (so far at least). I have hit the limit once when I was going hard on a weekend and I had to wait 5 hours, but honestly I was glad to get up and do something else for some time and the 5 hours went by quick and then back to it.

Cursor is also slept on. Claude is great and you technically are only limited by the time limit whereas with cursor can burn through large amounts of usage if a big session.

Codex 20$ plan is plenty for starting and managing a decent sized project. I've been using it since 2 months for my game, and I think I only ran out of usage 2 times before the week ended.

Just don't purely rely on AI to handle every part of the project in my opinion, and I don't have crazy bloated agents.md or superpowers installed as well, no need fot allat, just skyrockets the token usage most of the time.

Check OpenCode's GO subscription if you can budget out abother 5$ since it's half the price for the first month. I've been experimenting with 3 models in that subscription and these are my current favorites now:

DeepSeek Flash V4 pretty much can handle infinite amount of requests since it doesn't really use that much of tokens, but can make some mistakes and takes some time to fix if you don't know what you're doing, but best bang for your buck imo.

Qwen 3.7 Max just became available in GO plan and it absolutely rocks, fixed some issues that GPT 5.5 (High) and 5.4 were not able to fix in just 2 prompts, I'm quite surprised by it's performance but be aware that it will burn through your 5 hour limit in 30 minutes if you rawdog everything with it, I only recommend using it as a check for the implementations made by other models, and to plan changes.

You can experiment with using different models and combinations, slightly differs for your codebase etc. I think, but overall I'm pretty happy with using Codex 20$ + OpenCode 5$ plan, best bang for your buck in this budget range 100%

Depends on your language, how much time you are willing to spend setting it up.

Update: After reading through the comments and trying a few options more seriously, I decided to stick with #ad Blackbox AI. It felt like the best fit for how I actually work day to day and something I can see myself building a real workflow around. Appreciate everyone who shared their experiences, it made narrowing it down way easier.

I’ve been experimenting with different ai coding assistants for a few months, mostly for automating parts of my projects and speeding up repetitive tasks. the problem is I keep hopping between tools, and it’s starting to feel like I’m not really mastering any of them. I want something reliable that I can actually integrate into my workflow long term.

Which ai coding assistant do programmers here actually stick with when working on larger projects, and what made it hold up better than others you tried? I’m hoping to choose one and focus on learning it properly, thanks.

Hi everyone,

I am developing a software startup and want to use AI coding assistants (like Copilot, Cursor, or Claude) to speed up development. However, I cannot risk leaking my core algorithms or intellectual property (IP) into public LLM training data.

For those working in strict corporate or startup environments: How do you keep your code 100% private?

Are commercial Business/Team plans with disabled data-sharing truly bulletproof?

What local, offline setups (e.g., Ollama + local LLMs) work best for coding?

How do you practice code abstraction so the AI never sees your full logic?

Thanks!

I'm not a developer but my brother is. We're working on a project together but as the lone developer, it's taking him a very long time to build it.

I suggested using AI but he's never used it before and we're having a hard time finding good information about them. Companies like Base 44 make great claims but reviews say they don't let you access code and shut down your project if you stop paying.

What AI agents actually support the coding process and give you access to the code? We don't want AI to do it for us, we just want it to help out so my brother can speed things up.