End of 2025 roundup: The AI tools I've used in the past six months

No promotions included; all evaluations are subjective impressions from real-world testing. The order of introduction reflects my recommendation ranking—the first one is the best. My monthly spending on AI is around $200+.

AI Coding Tools

1. OpenAI - Codex: Just today, they released the latest gpt-5.2-codex. It truly works like magic—point it somewhere and it delivers, especially with long contexts and complex tasks. It can keep working continuously for tens of minutes to get the job done. Downside: it’s slow.
2. Anthropics - Claude Code: Undoubtedly the most popular TUI coding agent right now. But lately it’s been getting dumber—literally while I was writing this, the official team acknowledged the intelligence downgrade in Opus 4 and is investigating. Downside: expensive. Especially when using Opus 4, the quota disappears fast.
3. Warp: Supports multiple major models. Essentially an agent-based terminal with a friendly interface, great for newcomers.
4. Droid: I shared a dedicated post about it before. It’s also a terminal-based coding agent that does a good job on engineering practices and is suitable for multi-step tasks.
5. Cursor: I haven’t used it in a while, but I still want to recommend it because its interaction is the most natural and its autocomplete is the best. However, the price is now too high, and the Agent mode’s output quality is far behind other CLI tools. Still, it’s beginner-friendly.
6. Antigravity: Formerly known as Windsurf, now taken over by Google. It’s good—especially the integrated Google browser, which gives it a big advantage in debugging and front-end development. But it’s too resource-heavy; my computer can’t handle it. I’m not sure if they can optimize it. The built-in Gemini 3 Flash is free to use, and there’s also a free quota for Claude. Another downside: its autocomplete is terrible!
7. Kiro: This one’s from Amazon. Beautiful UI, generous free credits for new signups, and the actual experience is decent. Its Spec integration is good, but I personally don’t think Spec is a great idea, so I haven’t used it much. It also has its own CLI, and the experience is pretty nice.
8. Neovate: A coding agent developed by the Ant team. The advantage is that it’s not tied to any specific large model, supports many features, and comes with plenty of best practices built in. I use it when working with domestic large models.
9. Gemini CLI: Not sure if it’s any good now. A few months ago, the experience was terrible. Now the CLI integrates Google’s latest 3-series models; I might try it tomorrow. In theory, it should have advantages for front-end page development.
10. VScode: You might say this isn’t an AI tool, but its built-in GitHub Copilot is actually quite good for autocomplete. I barely use its other AI features.

Daily Q&A

Web:

• ChatGPT: I’ve carefully compared Claude Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, and ChatGPT 5.2. Currently, ChatGPT is still the top dog—you can try it yourself. I’ll keep my monthly subscription. It excels at problem analysis, technical guidance, image generation, etc.
• Gemini: The “nano banana” trend blew up, showing Google’s deep foundation again. With its own YouTube and search engine resources, it has unique advantages in training large models. In my testing, its video and image understanding capabilities are in a league of their own.
• Claude: I often cross-check results with it. In coding, Claude sometimes outputs higher quality than others.
• Qwen: Translation and writing.
• Doubao: Seems like the web version doesn’t have much advantage.
• DeepSeek: Also translation and writing.
• LobeChat: For testing various large models.

Desktop

• Alma: A tasteful wrapper AI chat app. Memory-first, with great UI interactions.
• Actually, I’ve always wanted a good AI writing assistant, but I haven’t paid much attention to it. If you know a good one, please share.

Mobile

• Doubao: A lifesaver for cooking, and a daily life guide. It integrates Douyin data, so its answers are fairly reliable.
• ChatGPT: When the mood strikes, I practice English with it—very fun.

That’s all I can think of for now! If you have any hidden gem AI tools, please share them too—let’s all use the most advanced AI tools to boost our productivity!