26Terminal, editor or app

Four ways to work with AI, and what to pick first

There are several shapes, and the difference between them is bigger than it looks.

A normal app or website. You're in a chat, copying code across by hand. Everyone starts here, and for "ask a question" it's fine. For a project it's torture: you'll wear yourself out moving pieces back and forth.

A builder in the browser. Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit: you write what you want and a couple of minutes later you have a live site, with nothing installed. For a first taste it's magic. But you pay for the convenience: it's hard to step outside the platform, limits run out fast, and checking security is on you (there's a node on that, and it's an important one).

A code editor with AI built in. Cursor and friends. Looks like a familiar program with panels, the AI lives to one side and can see your files. The entry is gentler: there are buttons, there's highlighting, everything is visible.

A terminal. A black window you type into. Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode live here. Looks the scariest and turns out to be the most convenient, because there the AI doesn't "help you type", it works. And if the black window really scares you, Claude Code and Codex also come as normal apps for Windows and Mac: the same agent, just with buttons.

What I'd suggest: if it feels frightening, start with an app or an editor. If you can stand one evening of discomfort, go straight to the terminal, because you'll end up there within a week anyway.

And don't deliberate for long. Swapping tools takes five minutes; a week spent comparing them doesn't come back.