Choose Your First AI Coding App in Ten Minutes

There are hundreds of these tools and the marketing pages all say the same four things. You do not need a survey of the field; you need to pick one today, build something small, and discover what you actually care about. This guide is four questions and a table. Ten minutes, honestly — and the last section explains why picking wrong costs you far less than you think.

The only four kinds you need to know

Every app in this directory falls into one of four shapes, and the shape matters more than the brand.

Prompt-to-app builders run in a browser. You type what you want, a working web app appears on a real address, and you keep changing it by chatting. A database, user logins and hosting come bundled. You never see a terminal and, unless you go looking, never see code.

AI code editors are desktop programs that show you your project's files with an AI agent attached. You can still chat your way through a change, but the files are right there and you will gradually start reading them. This is the shape most professional programmers use.

Terminal agents run in the black-and-white window where you type commands. That sounds forbidding and is, in practice, the simplest of the four: one window, one conversation, and the agent works directly on files on your own computer. They are also the most capable at large, multi-step jobs.

Cloud or asynchronous agents take a task, go away, work on a copy of your project on someone else's machine, and come back with a proposed change for you to approve. You close the laptop while they work. They assume your project already lives on GitHub.

Jules Freemium

Google's asynchronous coding agent that works on your GitHub repos

Freemium

🔥 US college students: 1 year of Google AI Pro free (more Jules tasks)

7.6 Visit ↗

Question 1: what are you trying to build?

A web app with accounts, a database and a public address — a booking page, a directory, an internal tool for your team? Start with a prompt-to-app builder. The bundled database and login system are the whole point; assembling those yourself is the part that stops beginners.

A website with no logins, or a small utility that runs on your own machine? Any of the four will do, and you should pick on Question 2 instead.

Changes to a project that already exists, especially one somebody else wrote? Not a builder. Use an editor or a terminal agent, both of which work on files where they already are.

A phone app? Start in a builder that targets mobile, and accept that publishing to the app stores is a separate and considerably less magical process.

One in-between case deserves a mention: Replit is a builder with a full cloud workspace behind it, including a terminal, which makes it a reasonable choice if you suspect you will outgrow chatting-only within a month.

Lovable Freemium

Build full-stack web apps by chatting, with Supabase and one-click deploy

Free plan, paid from $25/mo

🔥 Students & teachers: 50% off Pro for up to 12 months

8.6 Visit ↗

Question 2: will you open a terminal?

Be honest, because this is the question that actually decides it.

If the answer is "no, and I would rather not think about it", you want a builder. Everything happens in a browser tab.

If the answer is "I would rather not, but I can follow instructions", you want an editor. You install one program, open a folder, and type in a chat box beside your files. Some terminal agents also ship a desktop app for exactly this reader — Anthropic's documentation points people who prefer a graphical interface at the Claude desktop app rather than the command line.

If the answer is "fine", go straight to a terminal agent. You will get further, faster, and you can run several at once later.

There is no virtue in the terminal for its own sake. There is also no shame in it: it is a text box that remembers what you typed.

Question 3: what machine are you on?

Browser-based builders and cloud agents only need a browser, which makes them the right answer on a Chromebook, a locked-down work laptop, or a tablet.

For anything that runs locally, check the vendor's own requirements rather than trusting a summary. Claude Code lists macOS 13.0+, Windows 10 1809+ or Windows Server 2019+, Ubuntu 20.04+, Debian 10+ and Alpine Linux 3.19+, with 4 GB of RAM and an x64 or ARM64 processor. Codex documents macOS, Linux and Windows. OpenCode runs on macOS, Linux and Windows, with WSL recommended on Windows for best performance. On Windows, several terminal agents work better inside WSL, which is Microsoft's Linux layer — a one-off setup that beginners often find is the real installation step.

Question 4: what will you pay?

Three honest models, and they are not equivalent.

Free tiers with an allowance. Real, usable, and they run out. Bolt.new's free plan allows 300K tokens a day and 1M a month; Lovable's free plan grants 5 build credits a day, capped at 30 a month, plus 20 monthly cloud credits; GitHub Copilot's free plan gives 2,000 completions per month; Jules' free tier allows 15 tasks a day with 3 running at once. A failed attempt costs the same as a successful one, so a bad afternoon burns a good allowance.

Subscriptions. Around $10-25 a month gets you a serious individual plan on most of these: Copilot Pro is $10 per user per month, Cursor Pro is $20, Bolt Pro is $25, Replit's Core plan is $20 a month. Claude Code has no free tier at all — its documentation states plainly that it "requires a Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise, or Console account" and that "The free claude.ai plan does not include Claude Code access."

Open source plus your own model key. The app costs nothing and you pay a model provider per use. Cheap for light use, and the only option that does not tie you to one company.

Check pricing and deals before subscribing; introductory offers move around, and this page does not chase them.

Eight representative apps

Every claim below comes from the vendor's own pricing page or documentation.

Cursor Freemium

The AI-first code editor with agents, background agents and fast autocomplete

Free plan, paid from $20/mo

🔥 Save 20% with annual billing

9.0 Visit ↗

When the right answer is "use a free open-source one first"

Plainly: if you are not sure the terminal is for you, do not buy a subscription to find out. Install an open-source terminal agent, connect a model key, spend ten dollars of usage, and you will know within an evening whether this shape of tool suits you. OpenCode works with whichever provider you configure a key for, and Aider documents a provider list that runs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini to Ollama, which means a model on your own machine and no per-use bill at all. Cline does the same inside VS Code if you would rather stay in an editor, and Zed is a free editor with agents built in.

This is also the right answer if you object on principle to your work depending on one company's pricing decisions, or if you are in a country or an organisation where a particular vendor is not available. The trade is real: open-source tools ask more of you at setup and give you less hand-holding. What you get back is that nothing can be taken away or repriced without your say-so.

OpenCode Open source

Open-source terminal coding agent that works with any model provider

★ 211k · +1.4k this week

8.4 Visit ↗

How to change your mind later

Assume you will switch, because almost everyone does once they know what they want. The switch is cheaper than the agonising, provided you know which of your work travels with you and which does not.

Transfers cleanly:

• Your code. It is ordinary code in ordinary files. If it is in Git, it moves.
• AGENTS.md, your instruction file. A plain Markdown file at the root of your project describing your setup, conventions and testing commands. It is an open format, now stewarded by the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, and it is read by Codex, Jules, Aider, Cursor, VS Code, Copilot, Devin, Junie, Windsurf and over twenty others. Write it once, early, and it follows you everywhere. There is a full explainer on the blog.
• Agent Skills. A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file that teaches an agent a procedure. The format was released by Anthropic as an open standard and is supported by Cursor, GitHub Copilot, VS Code, Codex, OpenCode, Goose, Kiro, Amp, Junie and many more. Check the skills listings for what works with which app.
• MCP servers. MCP is the open standard that connects an agent to your database, your browser, your design files or your issue tracker — its own documentation calls it "a USB-C port for AI applications", and it is supported by Claude, ChatGPT, VS Code and Cursor among others. The servers themselves are portable; only the few lines of configuration that register them differ per app. See the MCP server listings and the ecosystem map for what pairs with what.

Does not transfer:

• Your conversation history. Every tool keeps its own. Anything worth remembering belongs in AGENTS.md, not in a chat log.
• A builder's hosting, database and deployment. Leaving a prompt-to-app builder for an editor usually means exporting the code and rehosting it yourself. This is the most expensive switch of the four, which is an argument for connecting a builder to your own GitHub account on day one.
• Tool-specific rule formats and skill fields. The core of a skill ports; a handful of frontmatter fields that only one vendor implements do not. The same applies to each editor's proprietary rules files.
• Your subscription. Obviously, but worth saying before you pay annually to save twenty per cent.

Decide now

1. Answer Question 2 first. Terminal or not? That eliminates half the table.
2. Take the free option in your row and build one small thing this week. Something real, and something you would not mind losing.
3. Write an AGENTS.md before you write the second feature. It is the one artefact that survives every later decision.
4. Read What Vibe Coding Can and Cannot Do before you put anything in front of other people.
5. When one tool stops being enough — usually when you want several things happening at once — the solo builder guides cover the stack that follows. The trending listings show what people are adopting right now.

Read the official docs for…

• Exact system requirements and install commands — Claude Code setup and the Codex CLI documentation.
• Current plans, prices and what each one limits — Cursor pricing, GitHub Copilot plans and Bolt pricing.
• The AGENTS.md format — agents.md, including the current list of agents that read it.
• The Agent Skills specification — agentskills.io, including which fields are portable between tools.
• What MCP is and which clients support it — the Model Context Protocol introduction.