guide
The best AI coding assistants, tested on a real codebase
We spent two weeks shipping features with Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf and Claude. Here is what actually made us faster.
By Rafael Moreau · Oct 28, 2026 · 9 min read
AI coding tools have moved from autocomplete to agents that open pull requests. To cut through the noise we gave four of them the same backlog of real tickets on a 60k-line TypeScript app.
How we tested
Each tool got the same ten tickets: two bug fixes, three small features, two refactors, two test suites and one migration. We measured time to merged PR and how many review comments the change needed.
What we found
- Agent modes shine on well-scoped, multi-file changes.
- Autocomplete still wins for small edits where you know exactly what you want.
- Context matters more than the model — tools that indexed the repo made far fewer mistakes.
Our pick
For most teams, an agentic editor paired with a strong general assistant for design discussions gives the best of both worlds. Browse the full Coding Assistant category to compare.
#coding#comparison