Search
Search the directory
Search the directory
Field Notes · 1 min read
Copilot, Cursor, or something else? A practical framework for picking the AI pair programmer that fits how your team actually works.
Choosing an AI coding assistant used to be easy: there was one. Now every week brings a new contender, and the honest answer to "which is best?" is it depends on how you work.
If your team is deeply invested in a specific IDE, weight that heavily. GitHub Copilot meets you inside VS Code, JetBrains, and even Neovim. Cursor asks you to switch editors entirely — a real cost, but one that buys the deepest codebase awareness on the market.
Inline completions make you faster line by line. Agent modes change the unit of work: you describe an outcome and review a multi-file diff. Teams shipping CRUD features see the biggest gains from agents; teams doing subtle systems work often prefer the tighter feedback loop of completions.
Run a two-week trial with three real tickets per tool — not toy prompts. Measure review time, not generation time. The assistant that produces code your reviewers wave through is the one that's actually faster.
There is no universal winner. There's a best tool for your stack, your codebase size, and your review culture — and the only way to find it is a structured trial.