I remember the good old days in late 2025 when Claude Code couldn’t compact for shit and I would switch back and forth between Cursor and Windsurf for their superior context engineering. Then in December/January, I started hitting Cursor overages within days and fell back to Claude Code. That timing coincided with Claude Code quickly getting good at context and I never looked back.
I pretty much live in CC these days (outside of work) and I realized I hadn’t opened Cursor or Windsurf in so long that I didn’t even know Windsurf is Devin Desktop now. I thought about canceling a few times in the last couple of months, but I like both companies and it’s fun to have all the tools. Not that fun though when I’m paying monthly for them and don’t end up using them at all. Today I finally canceled. I honestly feel kind of sad about it.
I hope to one day have a reason to try either of them again, and would love to see Cursor/Grok on top of the leader board soon (we need more competitors at the top). But for now, I can’t keep paying for tools I don’t have any incentive to pick up.
As for Lovable, I only ever used it for mocking up initial designs because it did a better job than everything else, but… Claude Design. I think Lovable still has a market that hasn’t been gobbled up by the big labs, but it’s just not a tool I need.
So that leaves me paying for:
Claude 20x
Claude 5x (backup)
ChatGPT Plus (I don’t use it to code)
Ideogram (underrated)
Grok (through x sub)
Various APIs
*and local for some use-cases
I switch between Claude & Codex at work. I also have access to Cursor, but credits exhaust quickly, so I don’t really bother with it.
I’m sure my preferences will change again at some point, but it’s crazy to think that just ~6 months ago, we were in an era where it made sense to jump tools every other week as a different one would pull ahead.
What is everyone else using? Can someone convince me why I should be using Cursor or Devin these days?
Summary
*The news aggregator here didn’t pick up the Windsurf > Devin Desktop change because we weren’t tracking the Devin blog and the change was barely reported elsewhere. We’re tracking them now though. Corrected =)