AI Coding Tools

A few people have asked about what tools I'm using for AI coding so I figured I'd snapshot what I'm using right now. Given how fast AI is changing it will probably be different six months from now. I haven't tested different tools extensively so don't take this as expert advice, just one data point.

For tab completion I've been using Amp Tab which is the tab completion part of Amp which is Sourcegraph's second generation AI coding tool (after Cody). Amp itself is a little too aggressive for my style of programming. I prefer to review changes closely before applying them. Currently Amp Tab is experimental and is still free. My understanding is that it's similar to Cursor, which I haven't tried because I prefer to use standard VSCodium. Even Amp Tab can be a little aggressive for me sometimes. I have to be careful about hitting tab to indent a line since it's liable to go and make changes to my code.

For investigating, reviewing, or writing code I've been using Cline as a VSCode extension. Cline is open source and lets you pick your AI model and provider. I've been using OpenRouter so I can try out different models. You can also use Cline as the provider which I might have done if I'd realized it before I signed up with OpenRouter.

Cline has a "planning" mode which is basically read-only, and an "act" mode where it makes code changes. Even in act mode I require approval for code changes.

As far as models, I started out with Claude Sonnet 3.5 and progressed to 3.7 and now 4. I've also tried a few others like GPT-5 and grok-code-fast-1. There isn't a huge difference, they can all do well or mess up badly but I tend to go back to Claude Sonnet 4 even though it's one of the more expensive ones. The last few months I've been spending about $50 per month on model usage. It's worth it for me, as much for the learning experience as for the actual code produced. If you didn't want to (or couldn't afford to) spend money on it, there are usually free or cheap options. 

For general research I've been using Gemini 2.5 Pro, mostly because it's included with our company Gmail/Google accounts. It works well to research algorithms or data structures.

The big question these days is whether programmers are actually more productive using AI. There have been studies that show that although programmers feel they're more productive, they're actually not. It sounds a bit like multi-tasking. I wouldn't say it's made a huge difference to my productivity. Some types of tasks go quicker, but for others AI can become a big time waster. I would say the quality of my code might be slightly higher from having more tests and more reviews.

Current Tools

I'm posting this mostly because it's interesting to look back and see how things change.

Hardware

Desktop - 27" 2017 iMac Pro. Considering it's 8 years old, performance is still quite reasonable. It's a 3.2 GHz 8 core Intel Xeon with 64 GB of DDR4 memory.

Laptop - 16" 2019 MacBook Pro with a 2.3 GHz 8 core Intel Core i9, also with 64 GB of DDR4 memory.

Apple could almost certainly have sold me a new machine, if they still made 27" iMacs, and if they didn't charge a fortune to get 64 GB of memory. Also, moving to an Apple cpu would make it harder to run a Windows VM.

Keyboard - For the last 5 years I've been using Varmilo mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Silver switches.

NAS - Synology DS920+ NAS with four 10 TB drives for 26 TB of redundant capacity.

Wifi - Netgear Orbi RBR50 + Satellite

Software

IDE/editor - VSCodium - the open source version of VSCode, without tracking. Prior to VSCode I used Microsoft Visual Studio for C++ and Eclipse for Java.

Programming Language - Go - I made a bet on Go over 10 years when it was still new. Back then it was barely production ready. Luckily, it has improved hugely and has become relatively mainstream. Like any language, it has its quirks, but for the most part I'm happy with it. Rust is interesting, but Suneido needs garbage collection. I don't miss C++ or Java.

Version Control - Git & Github

Parallels VM's for Windows and Linux

Browser - Firefox - I'm not particularly a fan of Firefox and I'd rather Mozilla would focus on making a good browser instead of going off on tangents like the AI bandwagon. But I hate the thought of Google having a 100% monopoly on browsers. I could use Safari but I'm not crazy about the megacorp that Apple has become either.

Notes - Obsidian - I used Evernote for a long time, then moved to Joplin, and finally to Obsidian for the last few years. I like that it doesn't have a proprietary database, just markdown files in directories. And I'm happy with its wysywyg markdown editor. Unfortunately, it's not open source.

Dropbox - I used to rely on Dropbox to keep my office and home computers in sync. Now that I work from home full time it's more to keep my desktop and laptop in sync. It's also nice to be able to access files from my tablet or phone occasionally.

Antivirus - Bitdefender

Cloud Backups - Backblaze

Sync - Chronosync - to mirror my 5 TB of photos to the Synology NAS

Local Backups - Restic - More for developers than consumers but seems to work well. I've tried various other backup programs and haven't liked any of them.

Apple's Time Machine is a great concept but it's never been reliable for me. It'll stop backup up without any kind of notification. Or the backups will become corrupted and you have to start over. I suspect the combination of using a NAS and having a huge number of files is too much for it.

Tools: Joplin Notes App

I recently (Nov.) started using Joplin, "An open source note taking and to-do application with synchronization capabilities" and I'm quite happy with it.

I've been a long time Evernote user (over 10 years). Although it was a bit rough at first (see A Plea to Evernote) it has worked well for me. Like Joplin, it meets my requirement for something that runs on Windows, Mac, and phone/tablet, and works off-line. (Joplin also runs on Linux.)

I'm pretty sure Evernote is an example of Conway's Law at work. Their versions have the same overall features, but there are enough small differences to be quite annoying when you're switching back and forth. You'd think someone at a high level would push for consistency. It's stupid stuff like one version puts a button at the right and another at the left. Then they came out with a new Mac version that was missing a bunch of features, and made yet another set of differences.

I've looked for alternatives in the past, but haven't found anything that matched my needs. I can't remember where I came across Joplin. I hadn't found it when I looked in the past. I wasn't specifically looking for an open source solution, but it's nice that Joplin is open source. It seems to have an active and growing community and user base. 

One of the things I like about Joplin is that it's primarily Markdown. Most of my notes are plain text (see Taking Notes) but it's nice to have a little formatting at times. There is a new WYSIWYG editor, but previously it was the standard split screen edit & preview, or toggle back and forth. I mostly stay in the raw markdown mode.

One of the things I feared about switching was having to leave all my old notes behind in another program. But Joplin can import Evernote's export format. I haven't moved everything yet (there's a lot) but I transferred my Suneido notebook which is roughly 2000 notes. It took a little while to sync/upload and then sync/download on other devices but it worked well. There are a few formatting glitches, but that isn't surprising.

Interestingly, Joplin doesn't (yet) run its own sync servers. Instead you can use Nextcloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, WebDAV, or the file system. I already use Dropbox so that was the easiest for me. They are working on their own sync server software.

Since I got Joplin I have hardly touched Evernote. I use Joplin every day to keep notes on my work. If you're looking for a notes app it's worth checking out.

Old School

As I progress on suneido.js I'm accumulating a number of miscellaneous commands I need to run regularly. So far I've avoided any kind of build tool. I started writing shell scripts (OS X) and batch files (Windows) which worked but is ugly. And led to git problems with executable permissions.

So I started looking at build tools. The big one these days seems to be Gulp but so far I don't need its fancy streaming and plugins. So I searched for something simpler, and came across a comment that said something to the effect "if you're from those days, you could use make". They likely meant it in a derogatory way, but it made sense to me. I already have make on Windows and OS X and know how to use it. And it's dead simple to use it to simply run a few commands.

So now I can run "make bundle" or "make test". It's perfect for what I need. The hip kids can shake their heads all they want.

Alm TypeScript Editor

When I was reading TypeScript Deep Dive (recommended) I noticed a mention of an "alm" TypeScript editor. I'd never heard of it so I figured I'd better check it out.

The developer turned out to be the same as the author of the book - Basarat Ali Syed aka "bas". Who also turned out to be the the original developer of the atom-typescript plugin that I've been using.

Alm is a new project but it's moving quickly and is already full featured. And there's actually documentation :-) It has features like go to definition, find references, and even rename refactor. It also has some flashier features like dependency graphs and AST views. It has an outline side bar (alm calls it a Semantic View) which is a feature I really like in Eclipse and miss in Visual Studio. (We also have it in Suneido.)

The current "packaging" is a little quirky - you start it from a command prompt and the actually UI runs in Chrome. It would be nice to see it packaged with Electron, like Atom, but that's not critical.

You can use Chrome's Save To Desktop to open it as a "bare" window without the browser chrome, but you still have to start Alm first. No doubt there's a way to automate that. Or you can use "alm -o" which will open it in a tab in Chrome, and then use something like the Chrome extension Open as Popup.

I was interested to see that it was using the CodeMirror JavaScript code editor component which is what we have been using in the suneido.js project. But recently it changed to use the Monaco editor which was written for Visual Studio Code and recently released as a separate open source component. That makes sense because Monaco is written in TypeScript, and TypeScript was the original target language for Visual Studio Code.

Alm leverages the actual TypeScript compiler for source code analysis, which seems like the ideal approach.

I've only used it for a few days and I'm still learning my way around, but it looks like it will be my preferred editor for TypeScript.

Programming in Typescript

I've been back working on suneido.js recently, which means programming in JavaScript or, my preference, TypeScript. It's been awhile so I had to get back up to speed on what tools to use. In case it's useful to anyone, here's what I've settled on (for now).

• install Node.js (current 6.3 rather than stable since I'm not in production)
• use npm to install TypeScript (currently at 1.8)

I started used Visual Studio Code, which I quite like, but a few things bugged me so I gave Atom a try and found I liked the editing experience better, especially after installing a few extra packages. One of the things I like about Atom is that it compiles Typescript automatically when you save a file, whereas (AFAIK) with Code you need to run tsc -w in a separate terminal window.

Atom packages:

• atom-typescript
• atom-beautify
• highlight-line
• highlight-selected
• simple-drag-drop-text
• Sublime-Style-Column-Select

The last three should be part of Atom core if you ask me, but as long as they're available that's fine.

Atom setting:

• tree-view - hide VCS ignored files
• autosave enabled
• show invisibles
• tab size: 4 (personal preference)

One thing I am still using Code for is debugging. Node's stack traces show the JavaScript line numbers which is a pain to relate back to the TypeScript code. I found some ways around this, but none of them looked simple. Code's debugger works well.

Previously I had also used WebStorm from JetBrains which has support for TypeScript and debugging. I may use it again, although I like the ease of using simple tools like Atom and Code.

Interestingly, Visual Studio Code is built on top of Electron, which was originally developed for Atom. And recently, Monaco, the editor component of Visual Studio Code has been open sourced.

I'm targeting ES6/2015 partly as future-proofing, and partly just because it's a better language. Most of ES6 is pretty well supported in Node and browsers, and there are tools like Babel to run it under ES5. Exploring ES6 is a useful resource. Strangely, none of the browsers support ES6 modules natively. You can still use them in the Typescript code but they need to be compiled to AMD for the browser, and CommonJS for Node (e.g. testing).

Although JavaScript has some quirks that I don't care for, overall I quite like it. And with Typescript for type checking, I don't mind programming in it at all. One thing I like about Typescript, as opposed to things like CoffeeScript is that it doesn't obscure the JavaScript.

Thankfully getting going again has gone smoother this time than my last bout of Yak Shaving

You can follow progress on suneido.js on GitHub. There's still a long way to go!

Go Editors

Up till recently I've been using Sublime Text with GoSublime to write Go code. It works pretty well. Sublime is a good editor and GoSublime integrates with the Go tools fairly well. But coming back to it after being away I found it quite annoying that compile errors are only shown in the output pane, not marked on the source code. And you can't even click on the error to go to that line. I'm not a big fan of using line numbers but with Sublime I was pretty much forced to display line numbers and use them manually. (There's probably some way to get clicking on errors to go to the line but nothing obvious.)

I'm not sure where Sublime is at. Sublime 3 has been in beta for a long time. GoSublime has some activity but doesn't seem to be doing too much either.

So I've been on the lookout for alternatives. And I needed something that was available on both Mac and Windows.

I came across something about Github's Atom editor and the go-plus extension. I had some difficulties getting it working on Windows, easier on Mac. It has better integration between Go and the editor, showing lines with errors and letting you click on the errors. But it doesn't seem to have much support for things like running tests. I realize that's outside the scope of just an editor, and I can always run the tests outside the editor. But I'd still prefer to have it. (Again, there may be some way to do it, but if so it wasn't obvious.)

Both Eclipse and IntelliJ have facilities for Go but they seem like very heavy weight tools for a "lightweight" language like Go.

The other recommendation I'd seen was LiteIDE. It's somewhere in between a full IDE like Eclipse, and an editor like Atom. It was easier to install than either Sublime or Atom since it's a single package, no add ons to worry about. I haven't used it a lot yet but it seems like it might be a good option. The editor is decent and it doesn't force me to use line numbers. I can run tests. The only weakness I've found so far is that it doesn't support column select or multiple select. I can probably live without that, if need be I can always use another editor for the odd time I need it. And it looks like the Kate editor that LiteIDE uses does support this so I'd guess it might be added at some point.

The project seems quite active. I found a bug where some keyboard shortcuts didn't work when you had multiple windows open. I couldn't find any mention of this problem so I entered a bug for it. Within hours I got a notification of a fix committed. It looked like an easy fix, and I haven't tried to build from source to test it, but it's still impressive that the issue was addressed so quickly.