The point is not the individual tools, which at this point are just wrappers around the major LLMs. The point is the snake oil salesmen of major LLM companies have been telling us for several years now that it is "just about to happen". A new technology revolution. A new post-scarcity world if you will. A tremendous increase in technological output, unleashed creativity etc. Altman routinely blabs about achieving AGI. Meanwhile hallucination of the models is a known feature, unfortunately it's not a bug we can fix. The hallucinations will never go away, because the LLM models are advanced text generators (quoting Charles Petzold) producing text based on essentially probability that one token should follow the next one. That means mate, you can be a superstar at the "advanced" skill of "prompting" (i.e. typing in conversational english language sentences), the crappy tool will still produce output that does not make sense, for example type out code with non-existing framework methods etc. Why? Because with every prompt, you retrain and re-tune the model a little bit. They don't even hold the authority of a dusty old encyclopedia. You use several tools simultaneously, why? Because you cannot really rely on any of them. So you try to get a mean minimum out of several. But a mean minimum of a sum of crap, will still end up crap. If any of the the 3-4 major LLM engines had any competitive advantages, they would have literally obliterated the competition by now. Why is that not happening? Where is the LLM equivalent of nascent Google obliterating Altavista and Excite or an equivalent of Windows 95 taking the PC, React taking over the web frontend etc? And by the way, you know that there was another famous guy at Apple, right?

They've been saying that kind of shit about everything AI related since fuzzy logic was the next big thing. It will never happen. AI will be used to cut staff and increase the workload of those remaining. The joke is on you for being susceptible to their hype.

I use a couple of different tools because they're each good at something that is useful to me. If Jetbrains AI service had a continue.dev/cline like interface and let me access all the models I want I might not deviate from that. But lucky for me work pays for everything.

You also seem awfully fixated on Copilot. How much exactly do you think your $12/month entitles you to?

Well thanks for confirming, you're getting "something" out of each, i.e. minimising mean error, because none of them is the ultimate tool. Copilot price is actually $19 per seat and running my own company, I pay a bit more than $19 bucks, you know for my employees, people like yourself. Why I am fixated on a single tool? Because each of those "tools" are wrappers around one of the major LLMs. I am surprised you don't know that. Copilot, Windsurf, CLine etc. are all just frontends for models by anthropic, google and chatgpt. So the output cannot be, by definition very different.

There is lots of value to be added in wrapping those tools. I am very well aware of what these things are. LLMs are not a fire-and-forget weapon, even though so many of you business types really really really want it to be. I mean jesus you sound almost as delusional as my bosses.

Business type? I am nothing near a business type, with two technical degrees and 20 years of hands-on experience. But I managed to build my own stable business over the years, in part due to being analytical and not rushing to conclusions, especially not over strangers on Internet ;) Where did you get the conclusion that I am delusional? It's actually the business types who think that these tools are magic, mind-blowing, etc. I am, like many other "technical types", pushing for the opposite view - yes to some extent useful, but no where near the magic they are being advertised as. Anyone who calls them "mindblowing", like some guys in my comment thread are either inexperienced/junior or removed from the complex parts of the work, perhaps focused on writing up React frontends or similar.