Antigravity, Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code, Zed, JetBrains, Devin Desktop: an honest map of AI coding tools in 2026, with verified pricing and real trade-offs.
Every week someone asks me some version of the same question: "Which AI coding tool should I use?" And every week the honest answer gets longer, because the market keeps splitting into categories that did not exist eighteen months ago. An editor with autocomplete, a platform that manages a fleet of agents, a CLI you pipe logs into, a browser tab that deploys a product: these are all sold as "AI coding tools", and they are not the same thing at all. Start with the fact that should frame everything below, because it is the article's actual argument and it usually gets buried on the last page. Between drafting this piece and publishing it, one of the products in it changed its name: Windsurf is now Devin Desktop. A second tool that belongs in any honest 2026 list had already stopped existing a few weeks earlier: Continue, one of the…