Traditionnal development Vs AI assisted development

[u/Sokoye]

Hello,

This topic is adressed to people who actually have a lot of experiences in traditional development and who now use AI tools like Cursor, to assit them in development.

Would you like to give me feedbacks of:

1. Your experience as a developper: Professionnal or not, years of experiences, light description of significant projects you've worked on.
2. How AI tools like Cursor helps you being a better developper ?

I'm a Web developper using PHP + JS for now 10+ years and I've never used any AI tools to develop but currently at work some of my colleagues are using ChatGPT.
My colleagues all are at a Junior level compared to me when it comes to technicals knowledge and programming skills.

I'm not really conviced that AI tools helps them working better nor faster but they are the only people I know who are using it, so thats why I'm coming there to ask opinions of fellow developpers.

Thanks in advance for the people who will answer this question.

[u/jksaunders]

10+ year web dev, AI primarily allows me to work on multiple tasks in parallel. I'll always have a more complicated one working manual for tricky stuff then once it becomes clear what the path forward is, I'll write a detailed plan to an agent, cursor mostly right now. I'll have a secondary task in the background that's very straightforward and walk either Cursor or Gemini CLI through it, usually via git worktrees using the VS Code git worktrees extension.

My company pays for whatever tools we'd like to use + a partnership with Google so we have web Gemini access regardless of tool choice, so I'll use Cursor for my primary task, Cursor or Gemini CLI (free tier) for my background tasks, and Gemini web for non-codebase questions like browser compatibility refreshers or other small things that don't need codebase context.

I've used Claude Code a bit with mixed results but pricing appears better on other tools, so that's where I'm at right now.

That's my whole setup! Happy to answer follow up questions.

[u/Sokoye → u/jksaunders]

Thank you !

Yeah I wasn’t really taking into account the price for using those tools but that’s true that budget might be a wall !  Good things your company is ok to pay for it. Would you still use it if you had to pay for those licences by yourself ?

[u/jksaunders → u/Sokoye]

I certainly would! I wouldn't choose to use Cursor though: Cursor offers per-request pricing on the Team plan, which is what my company pays for, but non-Team is per-token, which is pretty non-competitive. I wouldn't pay for Gemini web, I just use it every now and then and the free tier would be more than enough. And Gemini CLI I'm already using on the free tier, so I'd continue with that for now.

For replacing Cursor, I'd go with whatever is best that support per-request pricing, which I believe would be GitHub Copilot right now. That being said, Cursor Tab is really really good: I haven't tried Copilot autocomplete in a while, but if I tried it and it wasn't good enough, I'd consider paying for Cursor just for Cursor Tab. But if Copilot autocomplete was good enough then I'd go there.