29What else you can work in

The world hasn't settled on one tool, which is good. Briefly on the rest.

Codex - OpenAI's agent, comes with a ChatGPT subscription. The second of the two leaders, and not a "cheap substitute": it does the same work and in places does it better. If I were starting today and counting money, I'd take it without hesitating.

Cursor - the most popular AI editor. Feels like a normal program rather than a terminal, so beginners take to it more easily. Twenty dollars a month.

Zed - a fast, free, open-source editor. Pairs well with Claude Code or Codex: the editor for your eyes, the agent for the work.

OpenCode, Cline, Aider - free open-source agents, OpenCode being the most popular of them. You only pay for whichever model you connect, whether that's Claude or cheap DeepSeek. Cheap, but you'll be configuring things by hand.

GitHub Copilot - has a free plan right inside VS Code, with a cut-down agent. Paid plans start at ten dollars.

Antigravity - from Google, free for a personal account. In spring 2026 Gemini CLI was folded into it, and now it's a whole kit: an app, an editor and a terminal, with several agents working at once. Interesting if you're in the Gemini world.

By the way, if you find advice about Windsurf somewhere - it no longer exists under that name; it became Devin Desktop in summer 2026. The world changes faster than guides get written, which is one more reason to ask your AI instead of hunting for a two-year-old article.