IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment. It’s a tool that allows you to write code, interact with the terminal and your console, and run commands—all in one integrated panel.
Replit, Lovable, and Bolt – mostly what we’ve been using on our free weekly AI calls – are cloud IDE’s. To run code on your own machine and perform surgical-precision debugging, you need a local IDE.
The Foundation: VS Code
The most common local IDE is VS Code (Visual Studio Code). It’s important to know that many popular options, like Cursor, Windsurf, and Kilo Code, all run on top of Visual Studio. It’s the underlying IDE that powers all of them, and they then add their own agentic plugin on top.
Top AI-Powered IDEs
Here’s a look at a few of my favorite IDEs that build on top of VS Code.
Windsurf
My go-to is Windsurf. Their pricing is really good, and they give you a lot of token usage for the money. It’s prompt-based, costing about three cents per prompt, and it will execute as many actions as it can based on that single prompt. You can accomplish a lot of building with their $15 plan, and they include a lot of prompts in their trial.
Cursor
Cursor is also really popular. I don’t love it as much; I feel like Windsurf works a little bit more smoothly, which is why I prefer it.
Kilo Code
My new addiction is Kilo Code. This thing is awesome because of its “orchestrator mode.” You can give it a Product Requirements Document (PRD), and it goes through and architects the entire project. Then, it assigns tasks to different little agents inside the platform and can create really incredible, well-documented builds. It’s a fork of Kline and Rue, so it’s a very, very solid little platform.
Watch this clip from our AI weekly call where I give a little 2 minute explainer with screen shares of all 3 here:
