AI-powered software development tools are rapidly evolving. What began as enhanced autocomplete has expanded into AI agents that can write applications, debug problems, and manage entire codebases—or, at least, try.
“This has been remarkably quick,” says Josh Knowles, founder and chief engineer of the software development company Frescher Southern LTD. “We’re going through something like a phase shift right now.”
That shift has led to a pack of AI-powered coding tools vying to become king of this new hill. Several of the leading tools come from startups that didn’t even exist just a few years ago. But tech giants aren’t lying idle; other top options are from established players, like Microsoft, and well-heeled AI labs, like Anthropic.
Abhay Bhargav, founder and chief research officer at security company AppSecEngineer, says AI has already changed how his company works. “We use AI to build a lot of proofs-of-concepts and minimum viable products to get the ball rolling.”
The rapid pace of change means software engineers eager to dive into AI may find themselves leaping between tools like rafts in whitewater. Still, a few leaders have proven stable enough to build on.
Cursor
Cursor, launched in 2023 by the AI lab Anysphere, was the first AI coding tool to gain widespread popularity among developers and remains the most popular AI-focused integrated development environment (IDE) today.
An IDE is development software that provides a comprehensive toolkit that spans file management, code writing, compiling, debugging, and more. And Cursor is a fork of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (VSCode), the world’s most popular IDE. That base made the general look and feel seem familiar to many developers which, combined with its early entry, helped it gain popularity, primarily through word-of-mouth on Reddit, X, YouTube, and other social media platforms.
Cursor has AI-powered code auto-completion, automated code-rewriting to fix syntax errors, and the ability to tap Web resources or a developer’s own documentation as a resource that AI can use to understand code. Recently, Cursor added “agent mode” for multistep AI coding across a codebase.
Bhargav says that, although he frequently tries other AI-powered IDEs, he keeps returning to Cursor because of its code quality and reliability. “Most of the others, they haven’t been able to do as good of a job as Cursor has been able to do,” he says.
In a demo of Anthropic’s Claude Code, the AI tool completed complex coding tasks that would ordinarily take a significant amount of manual work.Anthropic
Claude Code
While Bhargav prefers Cursor, Knowles relies on a dramatically different, but similarly popular, AI-powered coding tool: Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Released in February, Claude Code stands out because it’s not an IDE. It instead works directly in the MacOS terminal or Linux command line, which is helpful for developers who prefer to use a text-based command line interface….
Read full article: Best AI Coding Tools: Claude Code, Windsurf, and VSCode
The post “Best AI Coding Tools: Claude Code, Windsurf, and VSCode” by Matthew S. Smith was published on 06/21/2025 by spectrum.ieee.org