I tested 15 different agents and come up with my own way to range them. Would you hire an agent? Does it spark joy? What is the output quality? It turned into a 61-page deep dive into all the nitty-gritty.
From IDE beasts like Cursor and Copilot to CLI warriors like Aider and full-stack champs like Replit and v0, etc – it’s a no-BS breakdown of what these tools can actually do when you throw a real-world web app prompt at ‘em.
All the resulting code is on
So, Who’s Crushing It?
Cursor Background Agent, v0, Warp: These three scored a near-perfect 24/25. Production-ready, polished, and just chef’s kiss. Cursor Agent was like, “Huh, didn’t expect that level of awesome.”
Copilot Agent & Jules: Tight GitHub integration makes ‘em PM-friendly, though they’re still a bit rough around the edges.
Replit: Stupid-easy for casuals. You’re trapped in their ecosystem, but damn, it’s a nice trap.
v0: UI prototyping on steroids. NextJS and Vercel vibes, but don’t expect it to play nice with your existing codebase.
RooCode & Goose: For you tinkerers who wanna swap models like Pokémon cards and run ‘em locally.
Who Flopped?
Windsurf. I wanted to hate it (gut feeling, don’t ask), and it delivered – basic tests, flimsy docs, and a Dockerfile that choked. 13/25, yawn.
Pro Tips:
Software Pros: Cursor + Warp is your power combo. IDE + CLI = dopamine hits for days.
Casual Coders: Replit’s your jam. Zero friction, instant hosting.
Designers: v0 for quick, slick MVPs. Just embrace the NextJS cult.
Tinkerers: RooCode or Goose. Total control, local LLMs, open-source swagger.
The full report’s got the juicy details – screenshots, rants, and all. I will be doing another report on agents at the end of the summer – let me know what’s your go-to coding agent in 2025. Drop your hot takes or grill me on specifics below.
Ruby is really good at writing DSLs, Javascript sucks at it.
I'll happily admin that this is user error, but I always have trouble editing Gruntfiles when I start to bring in other packages. Adding an additional task to a Gruntfile is way harder in than Rake, or make, or even Ant for that matter, mainly because you are dealing with hand editing a huge JSON blob.
Tweaking the file to add a different path in or whatever is fine, but there are many times where I wanted to to copy and paste something in to make it work, and I spent as much time fiddling with the format of the js file as I did solving my problem.
A lot of people love grunt, but I'm not one of them.
Thanks for your reply. I've been working with maven and make so far. I'm not used to do much stuff in Ruby, so that's why I don't consider Rake files for a big benefit of my working process.
Anyway I consider your points valid, although I also think you can remove a lot of the boilerplate ( Copy-Paste code ) by introducing some variables to your Grunt build.
I personally use Assemble [1] and I find it pretty decent for generating static content websites.
Good to know there's a good alternative in the ruby world.
There is code in there to pull the arp table and use that, but it's commented out because I never found a good way to determining how long things stay in the ARP cache. Since we don't know how long they stay in there, you will lose all of the "xxx left the network" notices, so we made that trade off.
All the resulting code is on
So, Who’s Crushing It?
Cursor Background Agent, v0, Warp: These three scored a near-perfect 24/25. Production-ready, polished, and just chef’s kiss. Cursor Agent was like, “Huh, didn’t expect that level of awesome.”
Copilot Agent & Jules: Tight GitHub integration makes ‘em PM-friendly, though they’re still a bit rough around the edges.
Replit: Stupid-easy for casuals. You’re trapped in their ecosystem, but damn, it’s a nice trap.
v0: UI prototyping on steroids. NextJS and Vercel vibes, but don’t expect it to play nice with your existing codebase.
RooCode & Goose: For you tinkerers who wanna swap models like Pokémon cards and run ‘em locally.
Who Flopped?
Windsurf. I wanted to hate it (gut feeling, don’t ask), and it delivered – basic tests, flimsy docs, and a Dockerfile that choked. 13/25, yawn.
Pro Tips:
Software Pros: Cursor + Warp is your power combo. IDE + CLI = dopamine hits for days. Casual Coders: Replit’s your jam. Zero friction, instant hosting. Designers: v0 for quick, slick MVPs. Just embrace the NextJS cult. Tinkerers: RooCode or Goose. Total control, local LLMs, open-source swagger.
The full report’s got the juicy details – screenshots, rants, and all. I will be doing another report on agents at the end of the summer – let me know what’s your go-to coding agent in 2025. Drop your hot takes or grill me on specifics below.