I Tested 7 AI Coding Tools for a Week — Here's What Actually Works

So there I was at 2am, staring at a merge conflict from hell in a legacy codebase nobody wanted to touch. Three-way merge markers everywhere, and my brain had officially checked out around midnight. That's when I thought "screw it" and installed Cursor to see if the AI hype was real. A week later, I've tried seven different AI coding assistants. Some were genuinely useful. Others felt like glorified autocomplete with a marketing budget. The One That Actually Changed My Workflow Cursor is basically VS Code with AI steroids. What sold me was the Cmd+K feature — you highlight any block of code, hit the shortcut, and tell it what you want in plain English. "Make this async" or "add error handling" actually works most of the time. I used it to refactor a gnarly Express middleware stack into TypeScript. Instead of manually typing out every interface and return type, I'd select a function and ask it to convert. Saved maybe 2-3 hours on that PR alone. The codebase context is legitimately good