Honest question for this forum.

I save AI tool threads constantly. New model drops, someone's slick Cursor workflow, "10 tools that'll change everything." I open maybe one in twenty. And I still feel behind every single week.

Lately I think the problem isn't information, there's an ocean of it. The problem is that almost all of it tells you about AI instead of showing you. A thread describes a workflow. A launch video is scripted so everything works on the first try. None of it shows the real thing: the prompt someone throws away, the tool they reach for and why, the moment it breaks and how they dig out.

And that's the part that actually teaches you. Nobody got good at cooking from recipes or at chess from the rulebook. You get good watching people better than you do the real work.

If the agent writes the code who s actually testing it?

Do you still go through edge cases and user scenarios manually, or are you also delegating please break my app to another agent now?

I've been a full-stack dev for 4+ years (React, Next.js, Node, NestJS), so I went into vibe coding thinking it'd just be "coding but faster." It wasn't quite that.

I run an independent practice building for small agencies and fashion/retail brands, and I started leaning on AI tools (Cursor, Claude Code) to move faster on client work. The first 60-70% was genuinely magical scaffolding, boilerplate, even decent architecture suggestions came together way quicker than writing it by hand.

Where it got messy was the last stretch auth edge cases, a deployment config the AI kept "fixing" back to broken, and a couple of times it confidently rewrote logic I hadn't asked it to touch. Being a dev already, I could catch it and course-correct, but I kept thinking about how differently this would've gone for someone non-technical.

Curious what this community's experience has been:

Not which model benchmarks best.

Which one is actually open on your machine right now? And what did it replace?

Arteza opens on a grid showing all six studios at once, image, video, voice, music, avatars, editing. It demos brilliantly. It's the screen people screenshot and it's why anyone understands the product in four seconds.

It's also the screen our heaviest users leave immediately. If you're in it every day you already know which studio you want, so a menu of six is six things to skip. The people who love that grid are the ones seeing it for the first time, and they only see it once.

The mistake underneath is that I designed the first thirty seconds and assumed the next thirty days would sort themselves out. Everything I measure at signup rewards that grid. Nothing I measure rewards the tenth session, so the tenth session never got designed.

Trying to make the home screen a function of what you did last week instead of a fixed grid, which is easy to say and quietly a different product. If you shipped something that demoed well, what did you have to change once people actually lived in it?

Scaffolding frontend layouts, Tailwind components, and basic CRUD forms through natural language prompting is remarkably smooth now.

However, once an app requires dynamic, competitive state like handling real-time bids, managing race conditions when two events trigger simultaneously, or verifying payment webhook signatures pure conversational generation starts hitting walls.

I might be missing some but I've been pretty much in love with @Lovable, @Cursor, @bolt.new and have been trying to use @Replit more and I honestly haven't touched @BASE44 too much but have heard good things. @chrismessina has nudged me to use @Windsurf for whenever I build another Raycast Extension!
Currently I use:
- @bolt.new / @Lovable
- @Cursor
- @Warp
Curious what everyone thinks is the top one so far!

AI coding tools seem to come in two main flavors: IDE-based, like @Cursor and @GitHub Copilot, and terminal-based setups, like using @Claude Code to generate commands, scripts, or entire files. Both have their fans, but which one actually helps you move faster?

Curious what flow people are sticking with long term, and where you see the most gains (or frustrations).

Last year we hired a design agency to build our marketing site for @Basedash. They did an incredible job. The headline makes it sound like I'm dunking on them, but I'm not. The site was genuinely great. They built it in Framer so we could manage content ourselves, which was a completely reasonable bet at the time (and something we explicitly asked for).

I have used a few products to vibe-code my applications. The first one I used was Chatgpt. From this, I created my first application and it had a very average UI. I was using nextjs for frontend and backend, so for me, the backend part took time but it was decent.
The second product which is good enough for me currently is Gemini. This creates a very good UI and backend at the same time. The first time I used it, it was a super upgrade in the UI. I also used Lovable to create one practice project, but I don't know why I did not used again.

I also heard people's suggestion of using different AI's like claude, cursor etc. but moving in to a different platform has some friction.
What AI is most used or easiest to build an application? I recently heard of a new AI called Emergent, which creates the whole application with a single prompt.