Ask HN: What is your current LLM-assisted coding tool?
4 HiPHInch 3 6/2/2025, 4:06:17 PM
Hello everyone, I’m testing and comparing various LLM-assisted coding tools, and I want to know which tool you are currently using in your daily development workflow. Here are some observations and questions I have:
1. Cursor and Windsurf
- Both work nicely on local, but they use token-saving strategies:
- With very long context, they may truncate important information, causing the suggested code to miss key details.
- Even in normal scenarios, complex cases might exceed context or quota limits, interrupting suggestions.
2. “Roo Code” and API-based approaches - Directly calling paid APIs (e.g., OpenAI’s ChatGPT/GPT-4 API) works well but is expensive.
- Some free or community APIs (open-source mirrors, community editions) can be unstable, rate-limited, or slow.
3. Augment Code
- It’s said to be one of the most “intelligent” commercial products, but it’s also costly. - Many recommend its ability to rewrite, refactor, generate tests, etc., but for simple code completion, its cost-performance ratio may be lower than some smaller vendors or open-source plugins.
4. Refact.ai - Listed at the top on SWE Bench, it claims to support code refactoring, generating comments via LLMs, batch rewrites, and more.
- However, it seems rarely discussed in developer circles. How well does it support?
Questions for the community:- Which LLM-assisted coding tool are you currently using? (IDE plugin, standalone client, or API-based)
- What are the main reasons for choosing it? (e.g., cost, response speed, context length support, feature set, etc.)
- What pros and cons have you encountered during actual development? Specifically, how does it perform for debugging, refactoring, generating unit tests, automatic bug fixes, etc.?
- If you have switched tools before, why did you switch?
Thank you for sharing your experiences!
I also use Claude to ask general code questions, to explain something, give me ideas or code examples.
I am comfortably behind the state of the art.
It's the first sort of "magic wand" coding AI I've used, where in the past I just would ask questions of ChatGPT or Gemini.