I Stopped Paying for Cursor & Devin. Here's What I Use Instead.

Everyone told me to just use Cursor. So I did the research instead. A 2025 study by METR ran 246 real developer tasks with AI tools. **Developers predicted they'd be 24% faster. The actual result? They were 19% slower. **That's not a rounding error — that's the entire value proposition falling apart under real conditions. Here's what I found when I dug deeper: Cursor's dirty secret: Developers are reporting .cursorrules compliance as low as 0 out of 9 tests in agent mode. You spend hours defining architecture constraints. The model ignores them silently. No error. No warning. Devin's uncomfortable truth: Independent researchers at Answer.AI tested 20 real tasks. 14 failures. 3 inconclusive. Just 3 successes. One task took a human 36 minutes — Devin spent 6 hours and still failed. What actually works instead: Continue.dev — open source, BYO model, config lives in Git where it belongs OpenHands — human approval before every commit, full action logs, zero vendor lock-in The pattern is cle