I’ve long since embraced AI integrations into my AI, and I’ve experimented with several of the new app builders. I’m going to avoid commenting on the “vibe” coding meme that’s going on, I will say I’ve enjoyed some of the efficiencies gained. A few months ago per the suggestion of several peers I swapped from VS Code w/ Copilot to Cursor. It took some adjustment of workflow to incorporate Cursor into a viable tool worthy of its subscription cost, but once certain hurdles were overcome I found it certainly accelerated me. The release of Claude 3.7-sonnet came with a promise of drastically increased performance in code, which I found to be… not true. In fact, I noticed a significant decrease in performance…

…until I finally upgraded Cursor to its current version. The new agentic approach powered by Claude 3.7-sonnet has been significantly better, outperforming my expectations by far. It is far better with large contexts, tying together multiple systems, and behaving in predictable and desirable manners.

I’ve also experimented with Bolt, v0, lovable, and Replit. While I’ve snagged a few front end pieces from each, I’m yet to fully embrace the full “one-shot” builders. I’m hesitant to necessarily say they’re not ready though, as my experiments with them have admittingly been small experiments, not a full fledged dive allowing my workflow to warp to the tool versus the alternative.

There seems there are even more AI tools I’m yet to experiment with, each with a workflow from what I’m used to. I hope to sometime in the near future dive further into these. To that end I will be attempting a pause on my Cursor subscription this month; at that point I will embrace Windsurf for a small while, see if I enjoy an increased velocity or novel capabilities. I am also very much looking forward to the Replit sponsored SDx hackathon later this month; I want to see what in my workflow approach I am doing wrong to fully enjoy the tool.

#AI Tools #Cursor