AI toolbox - part 2

In the Paid AI Tools, two more coding agents are Cursor and GitHub Copilot. The two services both have free tiers but I've been their paid customers at very early stage when I first heard about them.

Paid AI Tools

Cursor - $16/month

I started to use Cursor this February and before then, I had not even ever used VS Code. But just in a few days on trial, I quickly subscribed to their annual plan, which was granting users 500 requests a month. The deal definitely worthed the money and I had never reached 500 requests in the following months until they grandfathered it and swtiched to usage-based pricing.

Regardless of the pricing drama, Cursor still has solid enough features rolling out every once in a while so I'll probably stick with this tier in the future. I find it stays sharp with my codebase and perform much better than other tools given: 1) it has the index of my codebase; 2) I've got cursor rules in place for many of my projects; 3) background agents function surprisingly well without extra setting up.

If you haven't used their background agents, one thing I like it most is that you can create a PR with it and then it will keep updating the PR based on review comments. You can now even tag @Cursor in your PR comment to ask it to fix things. This was also the case for Claude Code, but Cursor makes it easier as long as you authorize their GitHub App. With Claude Code, the setup was not very straightforward when I tried it, but they may also have a GitHub App to make it easier now.

GitHub Copilot - $8.3/month

I have subscribed to GitHub Copilot probably when they're still in beta. And for a very long time, I only use it to generate code completion hints in PhpStorm. It's untill this year (or last year) when they added Copilot as a reviewer to PRs and it can also write the PR summary for you, I started to notice $8.3 USD per month is well spent. You can also use premium calls when using Copliot as coding agent in PhpStorm or VS Code, and Zed also allows you to connect with it.

Starting last month, either they rolled out more features or I have finally come to my senses to notice their release notes, it now has Cursor rules style copilot-instructions.md so Copilot can know your preferences too. One cool repo I've found from a YouTube channel is Awesome Copilot, which was probably the first agentic tool I know where you can add a custom mode that easily.

Part 3 will continue with two more paid AI tools from big players, Gemini Code Assistant and Kiro (from Amazon). Stay tuned!