The strongest developer tools now read whole repositories, run tests, and carry out multi-step changes. This collection covers the coding assistants and agents worth putting in your workflow.
The main axis to evaluate on is how much autonomy a tool has — from inline completion to full agentic changes — and how well it fits your existing editor and CI instead of demanding a new one.
Run each candidate against a real ticket from your backlog; completion quality on snippets rarely predicts performance on a multi-file change.
Buying Guide
