Claude 70%. ChatGPT o1 for anything that needs more iterations, Cursor for local autocomplete, tested Gemini for concepts and it seemed solid. Replit when I want it to generate everything, from setting up a DB etc for any quick projects. But it’s a bit annoying and drives into a ditch a lot.

I honestly have to keep a tight rein on them all, so I usually ask for concepts first with no code, and need to iterate or start again a few times to get what I need. Get clear instructions, then generate. Drag in context, tight reins on changes I want. Make minor changes rather than wholesale.

Tricks I use. “Do you have any questions?” And “tell me what you want to do first.” Trigger it into the right latent space first, get the right neurons firing. Also “how else could I do this”. It’ll sometimes choose bad algo’s so you need to know your DSA, and it loves to overcomplicate. Tight reins :)

Claude’s personality is great. Just wants to help.

All work best on common languages and libraries. Edge cases or new versions get them confused. But you can paste in a new api and it’ll code against that perfectly.

I also use the API’s a lot, from cheap to pricy depending on task. Lots of data extraction, classifying. I got a (pricier model) data cleaner working on other data generated by a cheaper model, asking it to check eg 20 rows in each batch for consistency. Did a great job.

Claude and pasting code back and forth for simple things. But I’d like to try Claude with a few MCP servers so it can directly modify a repo.

But lately Cursor. It’s just so effortless.

Copilot and aider-chat