I Used Every AI Coding Assistant I Could Find for a Month. Here's What I Actually Pay For Now

I Used Every AI Coding Assistant I Could Find for a Month. Here's What I Actually Pay For Now Note: this is the fourth post in an ongoing series where our small editorial team tests AI tools in real workflows and writes down what we find. No affiliate links. No "sponsored by" disclaimers to hide. We pay for the tools we review, including this month's experiment, which cost us about $190 in subscriptions and a fair amount of patience. The setup I spent most of August and September doing the same two jobs across eight AI coding tools: building a small internal dashboard (React + a Node API) and maintaining an older Python service at work. Same tasks, same files, same me. The tools were GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Codeium, Tabnine, Replit AI, v0, Bolt, and Lovable. Why those eight? Because those are the ones people actually argue about in our developer group chats — and the ones a colleague keeps asking me to "just try already." I also wanted to answer one question that none of the marketing pages answer: what happens after the first week, when the novelty wears off and the tool has to earn its place in a daily workflow? Quick background so you know where I'm coming from: I'm a working developer, not a journalist. Ten years mostly backend, some frontend when I have to. I'm skeptical of anything that promises to write my code for me, and I've been burned before by autocomplete that produces confident nonsense. The short version If you only take one thing from this: Copilot is still the safest default, Cursor is the most capable if you'll actually use its chat properly, and the no-code app builders (Bolt, Lovable, v0) are not for me — but they're genuinely impressive for people who don't live in an IDE. Everything below is the longer version with the boring details, including the stuff that surprised me. GitHub Copilot: the boring, reliable choice I started with Copilot because it's what most of my team already had. The completions are fast and mostly invisible — which is th