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
When you have 5 unrelated questions, should you pack them into one message to the LLM, or send 5 requests simultaneously? Which is faster? Splitting into multiple independent parallel requests is almost always faster. This isn't a gut feeling — it's determined by the underlying inference mechanism of LLMs. Let's walk through the reasoning from first principles. To understand this problem, you firs