Code with AI, without the hype

Developer-depth guides for coding with AI assistants — prompting that lands, review that catches real bugs, building LLM features, and shipping safely. Written by engineers, for engineers.

ADVERTISEMENT

Free tools

All tools →

Every tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded or stored.

Free tool

AI API Cost Calculator

Work out what an AI model actually costs per month from your token usage, and compare the major models side by side.

Free tool

Token Estimator

Paste any text to estimate how many tokens it uses, and see what that text would cost to send to each major model.

Free tool

Subscription vs API: Which Is Cheaper?

Compare a flat monthly chat subscription against the equivalent API usage and find the break-even point where one overtakes the other.

Free tool

AI Tool Picker

Four questions about your task, budget and experience — then a recommendation and the guides to go with it.

Browse by topic

All guides →
3 guides

AI Coding Foundations

How AI coding assistants really work — context, retrieval, models — and how to set up a workflow that gets good code.

3 guides

Prompting for Code

Prompting that produces correct, idiomatic code, feeding the AI real codebase context, and debugging without loops.

3 guides

Reviews, Tests & Docs

Using AI for code review that finds real bugs, tests worth keeping, and docs and commit messages that stay useful.

3 guides

Building AI Features

Adding LLM features to an app, a hype-free take on RAG, and when an agent beats a single well-crafted prompt.

3 guides

AI Coding Assistants

Evaluating Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code and the rest for your workflow — and the limits worth knowing.

3 guides

Shipping Safely

Security-reviewing AI-written code, the licensing and IP questions, and managing tech debt and over-reliance.

ADVERTISEMENT

Start here

All guides →

What Your AI Coding Assistant Actually Sees: Context, Retrieval, and Why It Invents APIs

A developer-level look at how coding assistants assemble context, retrieve code, and why they confidently call functions that don't exist.

Alex Ryder, a staff software engineer · 9 min read

Getting Idiomatic Code on the First Try: Prompts That Constrain the Model

The difference between usable output and a rewrite is usually the constraints you set before the model writes a line.

Mei Lin, a developer-tools engineer · 8 min read

Reviewing AI-Generated Code for Security: The Patterns That Actually Bite

The specific vulnerability classes that show up disproportionately in model output, and how to catch them in review.

Nadia Frost, a security engineer · 9 min read

Stop Reading Benchmarks: How to Evaluate Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code Against Your Own Workflow

A practical rubric for testing AI coding tools on the work you actually do, instead of trusting leaderboards and demos.

Sam Ortega, a developer-productivity lead · 9 min read

Feeding the Model a Real Codebase: Files, Types, and Constraints That Actually Fit in Context

Good code from an AI depends less on the question and more on which files, types, and rules you put in front of it.

Mei Lin, a developer-tools engineer · 9 min read

Ship One LLM Feature Without Rewriting Your App

How to add a genuinely useful model-backed feature to an existing codebase while keeping it boring, testable, and cheap to remove.

Priya Rao, an applied-AI engineer · 8 min read

Why this site exists

Most writing about AI coding is a demo video or a hot take. It looks great until you point the tool at a real codebase with real constraints, and then the advice runs out.

We write for that codebase: how context and retrieval actually work, how to prompt for correct code, how to review what the model produces, and how to ship it without introducing a vulnerability or a pile of tech debt. Where we cite figures like model prices, they live in one date-stamped table you can verify on the model pricing page (last checked 20 July 2026).

Read more about who we are and our editorial standards.