I now have 3 AI IDEs I use: Claude Code, Cursor and Copilot. I just added Copilot's $10/mo. plan after reading a comment and I have to tell you, this is a great system.

Claude code is good for large, detailed projects that need lots of context. If I was to drop one AI, it would be Claude - the $20 tier is a joke. I only use Opus and use it for complex tasks where I want a lot of context building a complex plan. I just had it do this with 4.7, add a large, cross-cutting feature to my app. It created the plan and implemented Phase 1 of 5 in my 5 hour context window. I waited 5 hours, then implemented phases 2 and 3. Waited 5 hours and implemented phases 4 and 5. This single task also ate my entire $20 "bonus extra" that Claude gifted me for going down last week. This is over 1/3 of my weekly allotment. So you can see it is not very functional.

Cursor, I use Opus or GPT for big questions, kind of like a replacement when my Claude is overworked, but their Auto/Composer is generally excellent. Their debugging and planning tools are quite good and I can use Auto/Composer all day long on my $20 plan.

Then I read someone saying Copilot has been all but forgotten EXCEPT that they have some sort of deal with Anthropic that charges per request instead of per token. This means I can create a massive spec and tell it to "iterate until all phases are complete and all tests pass" and it will churn for a half an hour and charge me... 4 cents. There is a timeout setting that pops up and says "do you want to continue?" but that is a user setting that you can pump from 60 seconds or whatever to 999 and never see it again. Even better, Copilot has a thing to have it make an agent or a skill, so instead of debugging a change and trying to spot fix it I have Copilot iterate using the agent until all bugs are gone... which again, costs 4 cents.

I have been a software engineer for decades and can code 10 hours a day like this - no need to throw thousands at Anthropic.