I spent the last month talking to engineers at actual AI companies. Not the ones giving keynotes. The ones shipping code at 2am. Here's what I found. The Table The Honest Breakdown Cursor won because it's just VS Code with a brain. No learning curve. No new workflow. It's the path of least resistance, which is exactly why it won. Claude Code is the tool I'm most conflicted about. I use it 80% of my day now. But I've also watched it confidently write code that doesn't compile. The hallucination problem doesn't go away just because you're in a terminal. v0 is interesting because it exposes the truth: most UI work is just CSS and component selection. The hard part is state management and data flow, which v0 doesn't touch. Windsurf tried to do something clever with "cascade" mode. It works until you hit a complex refactor. Then it breaks in ways that take longer to fix than doing it yourself. Replit Agent is the most honest tool here. It tells you "I'm for prototypes" by how it works. The problem is people try to use it for production. The Real Divide Here's what nobody talks about: The tools that make you fast for the first 80% of a project all fail at the last 20%. The tools that handle the last 20% all require you to already understand the first 80%. This isn't a bug. This is the jagged intelligence problem. LLMs are superhuman at boilerplate and pattern completion. They're subhuman at edge cases and system-level reasoning. What I'd Actually Recommend If you're learning: Cursor + manual code review. Don't let the AI write things you don't understand. I learned this the hard way. If you're shipping: Claude Code for refactoring, Cursor for writing. Use each tool where it's strong. If you're prototyping: Replit Agent. It's honest about its limits. That's rare in this space. The Uncomfortable Truth None of these tools will replace understanding. I've watched junior engineers become completely dependent on AI completion. They can ship code fast. They cannot debug it. They cannot explain why it works. The tools are Iron Man suits. They make you stronger. They don't make you Iron Man. I'm sorry.