The author embarked on a long-term artistic project to create a season time-lapse video using years of photos, a task previously daunting due to lack of experience. AI coding assistants made this complex project feasible, allowing the author to complete it by providing instructions without hands-on coding.
Get Shit Done (GSD) is an innovative meta-prompting and context-engineering framework designed to enhance productivity for AI coding assistants. It streamlines spec-driven development workflows and addresses the issue of context rot to maintain clarity throughout the development process.
This article analyzes why coding assistants lead to exorbitant LLM API costs due to frequent, often simple requests and the critical need for sub-200ms response times. It explores the dilemma between using expensive flagship models for quality or cheaper economy models, hinting at the need for a hybrid strategy.
The author reviews various AI coding assistants, noting the significant shift in the landscape since Cursor AI's 2024 launch. They compare Tabnine's enterprise focus on privacy with Cursor AI's innovative AI-first, inline editing approach.
The author describes the frustration of AI agents forgetting crucial information between coding sessions, leading them to build a memory system. Ironically, the new challenge became the agent "remembering too much," applying old rules that were no longer valid.
The article reviews Sourcegraph Cody, an AI coding assistant designed to prevent errors in large codebases by indexing the entire repository for context, unlike Copilot. A two-week test on a 2.6-million-line TypeScript monorepo demonstrated that Cody's codebase-aware context significantly improves AI coding reliability.
The author built Governor, a Claude Code plugin designed to reduce token and context waste during long coding sessions. The tool addresses issues like huge memory files, noisy logs, and vague prompts, offering features such as compression, filtering, and validation to keep the agent useful without burning quota.
The article presents the top 10 open-source AI coding agents in 2026, highlighting the ecosystem's growth and diverse options for developers. It details tools like OpenClaw, ideal for terminal-first developers, and Cline, a VS Code extension with a visual interface.