The world of AI development is pretty wild. It's all over the place and it's changing rapidly. It is both scary and exciting at the same time.

TL;DR

I went from a hardcore nvim + tmux setup to IDEs when Copilot showed up, then Cursor and Windsurf, and now I'm mostly back in the terminal with Cursor and Opencode. AI tooling still needs babysitting sometimes, but with good rules and tests it can ship huge features in my voice. If you're not experimenting with it yet, you're falling behind.

Before AI

Before development, I was a super hyper nvim user + tmux user.

that classic scene from the movies where a person wearing a hoodie has 5 screens all with terminals going

Bam AI enters the room

All the terminals go away and I'm forced to use the IDE's again, at least initially.

In the early days of AI, I was using github copilot, at that time it was just a chatbot. It was alright, but so different from the world today. It was cool that I could pass it some code to refactor and I didn't have to do it manually. Or maybe create a test. Or generating something like a function signature or some other boilerplate code. But obviously it wasn't very good at all.

Eventually I found a copilot chat plugin for nvim and it was pretty sweet, I could split the screen and have the chat on one side so I didn't have to use the ide.

CopilotChat.nvim

Oh interesting, it's still being maintained at the time of this writing.

Cursor and Windsurf

Dillon Streator actually introduced me to Cursor and Windsurf. I still remember that feeling when I saw it write in the IDE for the first time. That was a feeling I will never forget.

I was starting to see the potential of these AI tools now. Before it was just some dumb chatbot that would get things right about 10% of the time.

I bought windsurf but struggled a little bit because I would hit their limits pretty quickly.

Then I looked into Cursor and realized we were able to use the premium models completely for free. Yeah that was a thing. It was awesome.

Cursor was a game changer for sure, but obviously with those old anthropic models, you still had to do a ton of babysitting in order for it to give you the right output. I still remember the days of yelling at Sonnet 3.5 to do things right! :D

Terminal is back!

Once all of the CLI tools starting coming out, I felt like I was back in the nvim days again. I could now get back in the terminal and it felt great!

I am only in the terminal as of right this writing. And my go to tools are:

• Cursor
• Opencode

Buy in

I think I will create a blog talking about what my opinions are on these tools and AI development in general. I spend a ton of time using these tools, playing with them, reading about development, talking about it, etc.

I'll give a quick overview of my thinking (a deep dive later).

Obviously it's not perfect but right now if you're not in it with AI development, you are falling behind.

But with things like Opencode and Cursor, with good rules, patterns, skills and test coverage, you can generate a lot of code with amazing results.

It's getting harder and harder to argue against it because I've seen it myself. Do a big spike, plan and implement with Opus 4.6 and in Copia Cash it is able to generate huge features that match my writing almost perfectly. I mean, it is me, it is writing in my style.

Update on whats happening right now

I'm writing this right now while actually implementing some cool stuff in Copia. We have a ton of documentation in our codebase and I am setting up 2 github workflows that trigger on a production release.

• Create a changelog blog based off the commit history since the last release.
• Update any documentation based off those changes.

We are doing a bunch of this right now by the way, like.

Issue -> tag -> kick off cloud agents -> open pr

Sentry error -> issue -> tag -> kick off cloud agents -> open pr

Final Thoughts

The world is insane right now, but I think it is all good. We are living in an awesome time where we have access to all of these really cool tools. I get so excited by it, you will see some contributions from me to some of these open source projects.

It's sad that we are slightly losing the art of constructing code with your own hands, but if you use the tools right, it can write things like you would and it saves the strain on our hands.

Thanks for reading. More to come.