What people actually build with

Anthropic’s terminal agent. Reads the repo, runs commands, edits files.

OpenAI’s coding agent, available in the terminal and the cloud.

VS Code fork with the model wired into the editor instead of a chat panel.

The incumbent. Inline suggestions plus a chat and agent mode.

VS Code extension that reads the repo and edits files from a chat panel. Open source; shipped as Claude Dev in July 2024.

A plugin-everything agent harness. Repo: deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness, MIT.

Google’s agent-first IDE. Writes whole files from a description.

Agent-first IDE built around long multi-file edits.

Rust editor, fast enough that the agent feels like part of the buffer.

Anthropic’s models. Long-context reasoning, strong at holding a spec.

OpenAI’s models. Broad ecosystem, good default when stuck.

Google’s models. Cheap at scale, very large context window.

Runs open-weight models locally. The offline option.

Open-weight models at a fraction of frontier API pricing.

C/C++ inference for GGUF models. The runtime most local tools sit on.

Open image models. Runs on your own GPU, which is why the tooling grew around it.

OpenAI’s speech recognition model, released 2022-09-21 under MIT.

Runs the dev server in the browser; you ship from the tab.

Still the fastest way to hand a layout to a model.

Full-app generator with a Supabase backend attached.

Image generation with the most consistent house style.

Vercel’s generator. Prompt to React and Tailwind components.

Static hosting straight off a repo. Boring and reliable.

Runs your code at the edge. Static requests stay free.

Static hosting with forms and functions bolted on.

When you need a long-running process, not a function.

Git push to deployed URL. The default for generated frontends.

Postgres with auth and row-level security already wired up.

SQLite at the edge. Free tier is generous enough to start on.

Serverless Postgres that scales to zero between requests.

Hosted libSQL, replicated close to wherever the reader is.

Drop-in auth. Removes a whole class of security bugs.

DNS, CDN, WAF, bot filtering. The free tier carries real traffic.

Transactional email with a sane API and a usable free tier.

Payments. Still the part models get wrong most often.