AI Coding Tools

My personal taxonomy of AI coding tools. #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, Augment, Cline, RooCode, Github Copilot, Kiro, AWS Q Developer

CLI-based

Command-line interface.

Examples:
Claude Code, Codex CLI, aider, Q Developer CLI, QwenCoder

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