AI Coding Tools: An Honest Assessment from the Trenches

1. What AI Coding Tools Are Actually Good At

Let me start with genuine praise, because these tools have genuinely changed parts of my workflow.

Boilerplate and Scaffold Generation

This is where AI coding tools shine brightest. Setting up a new Express route with validation, error handling, and test stubs? Used to take 20-30 minutes of copy-paste-and-adjust. With Copilot or Claude, it's 3-4 minutes of prompting and reviewing. The quality is good enough that I can ship the output after reading it carefully.

Same for: React component skeletons, database migration templates, Dockerfile setup, CI/CD YAML, API client code for a third-party service you've never used before.

Test Writing

Writing tests is something most developers procrastinate on because it's tedious. Give an AI model your function and ask for test cases — including edge cases you might miss — and the output is often very usable. I've found Claude particularly strong at generating tests that test behavior, not just happy paths.

Code Explanation

Dropped into a legacy codebase written in 2015 by three developers who left? Paste a function into Claude and ask "what does this do and what are the potential issues?" The explanations are genuinely good. Better than trying to parse it yourself for 20 minutes.

Regex and Complex One-offs

Nobody enjoys writing regex from scratch. "Write a regex that matches Indian mobile numbers including +91 prefix, with or without spaces after the country code" — the output is correct 90% of the time and saves significant debugging time.

2. Where AI Coding Tools Fail (Honestly)

This section is what most "AI replaced developers" articles leave out.

Business Logic and Domain Knowledge

AI has no idea about your specific business rules. It doesn't know that in your app, a "cancelled" order can be reinstated if it's less than 48 hours old but only if the payment gateway hasn't processed the refund yet and only for premium users. It will write generic order cancellation logic and it will look plausible. It will be wrong for your case.

This is the most dangerous failure mode: code that looks correct, compiles, doesn't have obvious errors, but subtly violates your business rules in edge cases you'll only discover in production.

Large Codebase Context

Ask Copilot to write a function that calls three other internal services with your specific error handling patterns, following your company's logging conventions, and respecting your existing middleware chain. It doesn't know any of that. It writes something generic that you need to heavily modify to fit your actual architecture.

This is improving — Claude Code and Cursor's codebase indexing are making progress here — but it's still a real limitation for anything beyond greenfield work.

Confident Incorrectness

The most frustrating failure: the model generates code with total confidence, it looks plausible, and it's wrong in a subtle way. It might use an API method that doesn't exist, get a callback signature backwards, or miss an async/await in a critical path. Junior developers are at highest risk — they can't tell the difference between plausible-but-wrong and correct.

3. Tool-by-Tool Assessment

GitHub Copilot

Best for: Inline completions while typing. The autocomplete is genuinely good and saves keystrokes constantly. The chat sidebar is useful for quick explanations.

Weaknesses: Context window is limited. For complex, multi-file tasks it misses important context. The PR review feature is inconsistent.

Verdict: ₹1,500/month (roughly $19) — worth it for solo developers and teams if only for the autocomplete. The ROI is positive if it saves 30+ minutes per day.

Claude (via claude.ai or API)

Best for: Long, complex conversations about architecture. Explaining large code blocks. Writing detailed tests. Technical writing and documentation. It has the best reasoning quality of any model I've used regularly.

Weaknesses: No IDE integration in the browser version. The API costs add up for heavy use. Sometimes over-explains when you want concise output.

Verdict: The pro plan (₹1,600/month) is my personal pick for anything requiring serious thinking. Claude Code (CLI) is what I use for codebase-wide tasks.

Cursor

Best for: Developers who want the best IDE integration. The tab completion is smarter than Copilot for multi-line edits. Composer mode (multi-file edits from a prompt) is genuinely impressive.

Weaknesses: Pricing has gotten more complicated. Based on VS Code, so JetBrains users need to switch editors.

Verdict: If you're a VS Code user, try the free tier. The paid plan (~₹1,600/month) competes with Copilot Pro and often wins on raw capability.

ChatGPT (OpenAI)

Best for: Quick questions, non-coding tasks, image generation (DALL-E), and situations where you need a generalist. The web browsing is useful for looking up current documentation.

Verdict: For pure coding, Claude and Copilot are better. For a general assistant, ChatGPT Plus is reasonable. I wouldn't pay for both ChatGPT and Claude — pick one.

4. The "10x Developer" Claim

Let me address this directly. I have not become 10x faster. I've become maybe 1.4x faster on the tasks where AI is good (boilerplate, tests, quick explanations). I spend additional time on reviewing AI output carefully, catching subtle errors, and explaining context to the model when it goes in the wrong direction.

What has genuinely changed: the activation energy for tasks I was procrastinating on is lower. Setting up a test suite for an old module I've been avoiding. Writing documentation for a service. Creating a migration script I'd been putting off. AI makes "I'll do it later" into "I can do it now in 20 minutes."

That compounded over a year? That's real productivity. Just not 10x.

5. Should Indian Developers Pay for These Tools?

The pricing is in USD but charged in INR, which makes it sting more:

• GitHub Copilot Individual: ~₹1,500/month
• Claude Pro: ~₹1,700/month
• Cursor Pro: ~₹1,700/month
• ChatGPT Plus: ~₹1,700/month

My suggestion: start with one. I'd recommend GitHub Copilot for most developers because the IDE integration gives the most seamless daily experience. If you want higher reasoning quality for architectural work, add Claude. Don't pay for three subscriptions until you've used one heavily for 2-3 months.

Also: check if your employer pays. Many Indian product companies (Flipkart, Swiggy, Razorpay, CRED, etc.) now have company-wide Copilot licenses. Don't pay personally if your employer will.