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Developer Tests Three AI Coding Agents for 30 Days on Real Projects

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A software developer spent 30 days evaluating Claude Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, and Cursor in agent mode on real-world projects, including a SaaS API, a data pipeline, and a legacy Node.js service. The tests showed significant time savings for boilerplate tasks, with routine REST endpoint generation dropping from 45 minutes to around 8 minutes. However, complex logic such as multi-step payment flows failed on the first attempt roughly 60% of the time, and agents performed poorly when debugging production-only bugs. Larger codebases caused context-tracking issues across all three tools, with agents occasionally referencing methods or types that no longer existed. The author concluded that AI coding agents offer genuine productivity gains for structured, repetitive work but still require human review for anything beyond straightforward scaffolding.

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