AI Coding Tools

My personal taxonomy of AI coding tools (and patterns). #taxonomies

They all use the same foundation models and fundamental Agent Loop, but differ in a few aspects:

Many are starting to produce their own First-Party models, though they are usually just post-training on top of available OpenWeightModels.

Note: many of the below tools now offer multiple interfaces—IDE, CLI, and cloud-based

IDE-based

Integrated Development Environment—a desktop app for coding. AI coding chat in a sidebar.

Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code Copilot, Augment, Cline, RooCode, Github Copilot, Kiro, Antigravity, Ampcode, Kilocode...

CLI-based

Command-line interface.

Examples:
Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, aider, Kiro CLI, QwenCoder, Gemini CLI

Cloud Agents

These run in the cloud, checkout your Github repo, do some work, then file a PR.

Examples:
Cursor, Github Copilot, Jules, Codex, Claude Code for Web

Vibecoding Platforms

These run entirely on the web, and will not only build your app but also run it and let you publish it to the world, as one integrated tool. You typically sacrifice a degree of control, like the ability to efficiently manually edit the code, in exchange for the simplicity of the direct chat-to-app flow.

Examples:
Lovable (I remember when it was GPT-Engineer), Bolt, v0, Emergent, base44, Replit... there's dozens more

Multi-worktree independent workers (whack-a-mole)

You set multiple agents to work, each doing one task, within the same codebase, working in isolated git worktrees on separate branches, so they don't step on each other.

You can do this yourself with tmux, but there are also many tools to help manage the process, such as Conductor, Vibe Kanban, Claude Squad, and ccmanage; Github / VS Code are also adding features in this direction.

The Ralph Wiggum Loop

Cargo-Cult Multi-Agent Complexity

e.g. Gastown