#4 Choosing the Right Tool to Run AI
My personal thoughts and analysis on which tools and editors are best suited for working with AI.
So far, we have covered using AI, managing projects on GitHub, and hosting them for free on Cloudflare. Before diving into how to use AI, let's analyze the tools available for working with it.
Throughout history, the programmer's primary tool has always been the editor. You might wonder if editors are even necessary in the AI era. However, as explained in article #1, AI is not a silver bullet. A common AI pitfall is trying to make a minor design adjustment via prompts, only to end up entering dozens of prompts for a single-line fix. Accepting that slight drop in productivity because it's still easier than manual editing is one valid approach. Even so, writing and saving your prompts in an editor as templates for future reuse, rather than typing them directly into the AI input field, is a simple yet essential practice for "AI-pilled" users (a term inspired by the red pill in The Matrix, similar to the trending term "Claudepilled").
Under these circumstances, coding autocompletions and feature-rich IDEs might become obsolete. Here is a list of editors with built-in AI panels:
1. (Strongest Candidate) Zed Editor: A super-fast, ultra-stable, completely free editor built in Rust. It's a shame the menus aren't localized into Japanese yet.
2. VS Code: Microsoft's free IDE. It was amazing when first released. Recognizing that its predecessor, Visual Studio, had grown bloated and slow, Microsoft rebuilt it from scratch. Today, however, VS Code is heading down the same path as Visual Studio.
3. Cursor: A pioneer editor that many early AI adopters used. Built on VS Code, it gained popularity initially because it could leverage existing VS Code extensions. It is primarily paid (with a limited free tier). Like VS Code, it is less about being AI-centric and more about serving as an assistant to aid human coding.
*Other mentions include GitHub Copilot: As the name implies, an AI assistant provided by GitHub. Since it is provided as an IDE plugin, it doesn't quite feel like a standalone editor.
In my long experience as a programmer, while autocompletion is convenient, a fast editor has always been the best choice. Back in the MS-DOS era when I developed Famicom (NES) games, MIFES was my go-to choice purely because it was fast. Although I used both vi and Emacs, I eventually settled on vi because it was faster. When window systems became dominant, I moved to Hidemaru Editor, then to Eclipse for work—which was so slow it drove me crazy—and bought Microsoft's Visual Studio for a high price, though it was disappointing. However, Visual Studio Code (VS Code) emerged as a lightweight, free, and highly extensible tool with a bright future (and is still widely used today). I used VS Code for a long time. I also used Sublime Text for a while, and Japanese Sakura Editor is another great option.
Reflecting on these past tools reveals a clear trend: "Lightweight editors survive." As OSs bloat, feature sleeker designs, and enhance security, the sheer volume of processing modern PCs handle is incomparable to the MS-DOS era. It's not just your imagination that even relatively recent PCs can feel slow.
While this might not matter to those who can afford to buy a high-end PC every year, having a fast and responsive tool is crucial for productivity. (Intel Macs can barely run newer operating systems like macOS Tahoe smoothly.)
Additionally, like many developers, I want to use the same editor on both macOS and Windows. (Learning new shortcuts gets harder as you age, sweat.)
Therefore, I highly recommend Zed. It runs comfortably on almost any PC.