One Developer Tested 8 AI Coding Tools for Two Months — Here Are the Results

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A working developer with ten years of experience spent August and September testing eight AI coding assistants — GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Codeium, Tabnine, Replit AI, v0, Bolt, and Lovable — on real tasks including building a React dashboard and maintaining a legacy Python service. The self-funded experiment cost around $190 in subscriptions and was designed to evaluate how each tool performed beyond the initial novelty period in a daily workflow. GitHub Copilot emerged as the safest default option, praised for fast, unobtrusive completions and an improved chat feature, though it tends to agree with the user rather than challenge architectural decisions. Cursor was rated the most capable tool, particularly for its agent mode that can make reviewable multi-file edits, though its best features require a paid Pro plan. No-code app builders like Bolt, Lovable, and v0 were not suited to the reviewer's IDE-based workflow but were acknowledged as genuinely useful for non-developers.

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