AI coding tools are starting to look similar on the surface: they all offer chat, agents, code edits, terminal awareness, and some form of autocomplete. But the real differences are in the workflow. The question is less “which one has AI?” and more “where does the AI live in your development process?” For me, VS Code is still the baseline. It is flexible, extensible, familiar, and easy to compose
April is one of those months where the tool discovery inbox fills up faster than usual. Partly it's spring project energy, partly it's that the no-account tools space keeps expanding in genuinely interesting directions. This month's picks share a pattern: they're not stripped-down versions of paid products. They're tools where removing the account requirement made them better — faster to access, s