AI toolbox - part 1

As a long time user of PhpStorm for more than 10 years, nowadays I'm using at least 5 different coding tools becuase of different AI agenetic experiences they provided. This series will keep track of what I'm using and what I use them for. The list grows beyond IDEs and all AI thingy I'm using will be covered.

Firstly, the monthly budget I'm spending on them is $100 USD, which I haven't hit yet. This does not include my subscription to PhpStorm though, as its AI functions are not included for free. I'll start with the paid tools first.

Paid AI tools

ChatGPT - $20/month

ChatGPT was the first subscription I had for the sake of AI. It has been the leading product in this field and just this week, it now equips with the note taker feature that it can record the current calls and summarize everything afterwards. This is the AI Meeting feature in Notion AI and now I can have it covered without paying Notion extra.

I also have great admiration to Sam Altman since I read his How To Be Successful. Even nowadays, I don't use ChatGPT as much as I used to, given the fact that for coding, alternatives are now better choices in a lot of scenarios. I'll probably still keep the subscription with OpenAI just to support his leadership.

Within my Pro subscription, I can access Codex in Web or Mobile app of ChatGPT (but not my Desktop app, don't know why), however, Codex CLI requires extra API credits that I have to purchase separately. And when I tried that, to use o4-mini-high, $10 of credits just burned out within an hour of code generating. Of course it was very silly of me to vibe coding in usage-based mode. Given the current status of Codex Web requries you set up the Environments properly and without granting it internet access, it can be quite useless. Codex is not a useful tool to me at the moment. (This will very likely be changed once I set up AGENTS.md right. We'll see.)

Claude - $17/month

Nowadays I'm on Claude more than ChatGPT. Especially even just on the Pro plan, I have access to Claude Code and sometimes I even use Claude Desktop to ask Opus to check my codebase. It's more than enough so far, sometimes I got to wait 4 or 5 hours because I hit my limit. But I'm totally cool with that, I can switch to Cursor or other IDE with other AI agents to get the time by.

Claude is awesome. I often think that I should just go ahead and get their Max plan and stay with it without switching between several tools anymore. It's just that great. I'm also a big fan of their parent company Anthropic's brand image. IMO it's much better than OpenAI, including the way they do product launches. The way they launched new models in May with Claude Code (it was in beta before then I think) was a highlight of tech proudct launches this year, could be the best since it's already August now. I watched every video of their presentations, with very simliar themes, personally I found the GPT-5 launch presentations were much less professional and unappealing to me. This may be an apple to orange comparison as the whole setting was different. It could be that I just prefer a auditorium, conference style in such situation.

You can find endless Claude Code related videos on YouTube that you can never get tired of. One aspect less mentioned is that, with Serena MCP properly set, you can use Opus 4.1 in Claude Desktop (because if you're on Pro plan, you cannot use Opus in Claude Code) and ask it to even code things for you, which is the best way to maximize your $17/month value of Claude.

Part 2 will continue with Cursor and GitHub Copilot. So see you in the next one!