AI Tools for Personal Dev – What are you using outside of work

Posted by No_Bowl_6218@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 15 comments

Hey there !,

I'm a senior developer, and at work, we're really diving deep into OpenAI-compatible APIs and tools like CLine on VS Code for our workflows. We also have unlimited access to Devstral, which has been a game-changer. It's been fascinating to see how AI can boost productivity and code quality.

However, when it comes to my personal setup, I'm feeling a bit lost with all the options out there. I keep hearing about Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, CodeWhisperer, and so many others... The market seems to be moving at lightning speed!

To add a bit more context, I also currently subscribe to Google One at €20/month, which gives me access to Gemini. I'm curious how you senior devs, who've got years of experience under your belts and might be juggling personal projects, approach this:

What AI-powered coding tools are you personally using in your free time?
Why did you choose those particular tools? (e.g., cost, performance, integration, privacy, etc.)
Are there any specific practices you've adopted to get the most out of these tools?
Any absolute no-gos or things to avoid?

I'm genuinely interested in what's earned a spot in your personal development toolkit. Thanks in advance for your insights and seasoned advice!

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colmeneroio@reddit

The AI dev tooling landscape is a complete shitshow right now, and I feel your pain trying to navigate it. Working at an AI consulting firm, I get to see what actually works across different setups and what's just marketing hype.

For personal development, I've settled on a pretty minimal stack. Claude through the API for most coding tasks because the reasoning quality is consistently better than anything else I've tried. GitHub Copilot for the IDE integration since it's cheap and works well enough for autocomplete. That's basically it for core tools.

Those €200/month personal setups you're seeing are usually people running multiple premium subscriptions they don't actually need, or they're doing heavy API usage for side projects that could probably be optimized. Most developers I know who aren't building AI products directly spend maybe €50-80/month total on personal AI tools.

Since you mentioned development agents specifically, that's where things get interesting. I've been experimenting with AgentForge and some custom implementations using the MCP protocol. The key insight our clients have found is that effective development agents aren't about having the fanciest models, they're about good prompt engineering and workflow design. You can build surprisingly capable agents using Claude's API with well-structured prompts that cost way less than premium subscriptions to multiple tools.

The biggest mistake I see developers make is trying to use AI agents for everything instead of identifying specific, repetitive tasks where automation actually saves time. Start with something narrow like automated code review or documentation generation, then expand from there.

Cursor gets a lot of hype, but tbh for personal projects it's overkill unless you're doing something that really benefits from the advanced context management. VS Code with the right extensions and API access gives you most of the same capabilities for a fraction of the cost.

The real value in development agents comes from customization to your specific workflow, not from using whatever tool has the best marketing.

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No_Bowl_6218@reddit (OP)

Thank you for all these details ! This is very valuable for me.

WaltzHungry2217@reddit

I have been through cursor, windsurf, google recent ide, all tui's, one of the only things that all of them fails is running on remote sandboxes, and also providing gpu for gpu specific code, that's the reason I recently shifted to using gitarsenal, has got opencode like interface and gives you on demand gpus as well for your code and you can manage multiple remote containers on the fly.

I think there might be a misunderstanding. What I'm focusing on learning in my free time right now is how to use development agents

Constant-Listen834@reddit

Personally I like cursor, the way it indexes the codebase is really impressive. The agent will also run builds/tests as it writes the code to make sure it works, then it’ll update the code if the tests fail etc

PragmaticBoredom@reddit

Download tools and give them a try. It’s so easy to try the different tools and do free trials that you should see what you prefer.

In my experience the people who claim one tool is amazing and another tool doesn’t work at all are exaggerating or projecting from anecdotes. The tools are all fairy similar because it depends more on the model you use. Again, you have to try different models because some are better fits for different things than others. The frontier models from different companies are where to look.

Which-World-6533@reddit

Someone really got their bold pen out here.

Why would I be using AI outside of work...? Most coding outside of work is learn something, not to add more slop to the world.

I code to build things, and with AI I can do that basically twice as fast.

Lord_Skellig@reddit

Because sometimes the thing you want to learn is not the same as the thing the AI helps you with.

e.g. I am working on a project building reinforcement learning models, since I want to learn about them. I have a very limited amount of free time, and I want to spend as little of that as possible building boilerplate code, fixing bugs, or coding stuff like visualisations / logging / config management etc etc.

FishWash@reddit

I code outside of work to create things, AI helps with that!

got-stendahls@reddit

None. If I code outside of work it's for fun. I'm not going to find it fun to supervise AI, I like writing code.

numice@reddit

Right now I feel the same. I like programming so I don't use anything. At work it's not allowed so. But I'm thinking about using it for like generating some scaffold code for a sideproject. I usually abandon stuff quickly because of the setup takes a lot of time and by the time I'm done with setting up I'm already unmotivated.