Last year, I dismissed AI coding assistants as fancy autocomplete tools. After five decades of programming, I thought I'd seen every productivity promise come and go. I was wrong.

My journey started simply enough with vanilla Visual Studio Code. Microsoft Copilot came next, making big promises about revolutionizing coding. Skeptical but curious, I tried that, then Cursor, a VS Code fork that actually delivered when pointed at the right code along with the manufacturers documentation. Adding Claude through Cline opened new possibilities, followed by Roo Code with its specialized prompts for architecture, coding, and code review.

Then DeepSeek-R1 arrived, unlike the other leading AI LLms, it is open-source, meaning anyone can use, modify, or share it for free. matching Claude's capabilities at a tenth of the cost. This constant evolution taught me something: yesterday's cutting-edge tool could be tomorrow's expensive luxury.

5 new tools to learn in one year, it’s what I live for.