We Tested Them All So You Don't Have To
Every developer and their dog has an opinion on AI coding assistants. Most of those opinions are based on vibes and Twitter discourse. We actually used all the major ones on production projects throughout 2024, so here's the real breakdown. GitHub Copilot is the incumbent. It's been around since 2022, it's deeply integrated into VS Code, and it's... fine. The autocomplete is genuinely useful for boilerplate — React component scaffolding, TypeScript interfaces, test cases. Where it falls apart is context. Copilot operates on a relatively small window of your current file and a few open tabs. It doesn't understand your project architecture. It doesn't know that you use Supabase instead of Firebase, or that your API routes follow a specific pattern. You spend a lot of time accepting suggestions and then immediately fixing them because they don't match your codebase conventions. The chat feature improved in 2024 but it still feels bolted on rather than native. Cursor changed the game. Full stop. It's a VS Code fork that treats AI as a first-class citizen rather than a plugin. The killer feature is Cmd+K — highlight code, describe what you want changed, and it rewrites it in-place. But the real magic is the codebase-aware chat. Cursor indexes your entire project and can answer questions like "where is the auth middleware defined?" or "show me every component that uses the Button component." It understands your project in a way Copilot simply doesn't. We switched our entire team to Cursor in mid-2024 and productivity jumped noticeably. The Composer feature for multi-file edits is especially powerful for refactoring work. Sourcegraph Cody is the dark horse. If you work on large codebases or monorepos, Cody's context engine is arguably the best in the business. It can search across your entire codebase, understand code relationships, and give answers that reference specific files and functions. The downside is that it's less polished than Cursor in day-to-day coding flow. It feels more like a senior developer you can ask questions to rather than a pair programmer sitting next to you. Supermaven deserves a mention for raw autocomplete speed. The latency is noticeably lower than Copilot, and the suggestions are surprisingly good. If you just want fast, accurate tab-completion without the full chat experience, Supermaven is worth a look. Now, the honest assessment. None of these tools will make a junior developer into a senior developer overnight. What they will do is eliminate the tedious parts of coding — the boilerplate, the syntax lookups, the repetitive patterns. A senior developer using Cursor ships at roughly 2x speed. A junior developer using Cursor ships slightly faster but makes the same architectural mistakes, just with more confidence. The real productivity unlock isn't any single tool — it's knowing when to use which tool. We use Cursor for daily development, Claude for architectural decisions and complex problem-solving, and ChatGPT for quick reference and documentation questions. Each tool has a sweet spot, and trying to use one tool for everything is like using a hammer for screws. Our recommendation for web agencies: Cursor is the clear winner for day-to-day development work. The $20/month price tag pays for itself in the first hour of every workday. If you're still using vanilla VS Code with Copilot, you're leaving speed on the table. One more thing — whatever tool you choose, learn the keyboard shortcuts. The developers who get the most value from AI assistants are the ones who've integrated them into their muscle memory, not the ones who context-switch to a chat window every time they need help.