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AI coding tools have been improving/updating like craze over the past six months. Honest question: what are some of the AI Dev tools (I prefer command line) th

AI coding tools have been improving/updating like craze over the past six months. Honest question: what are some of the AI Dev tools (I prefer command line) that have leapt ahead recently, with good tool/function calling? Do you (or others) have a clear preference for Claude Code vs aider vs some other alternative? Or is the meta shifting toward the orchestrators like Taskmaster and Puppeteer?

neya 1y ago
I meant to say that MCP is just a wrapper around good old function/tool calling, it's not a new superpower by itself. So, if you're designing a Saas, you don't need to use MCP yourself, you can just use good old function/tool calling. To answer your specific queries, I use the autocomplete in VS Code and I directly chat with ChatGPT-o3 for advanced problems because my background is in Elixir and most models that are hyped up fail badly with Elixir. I'm always a huge fan of o3 as it can solve the most complex problems I throw at it..
- atonse 1y ago
  Yes, but if I'm implementing "good old function/tool calling" today, why would I not implement it as MCP? I suppose it complicates things? MCP, in addition to being tooling endpoints, would also open up my software to a rapidly growing ecosystem that requires minimal additional work. AND I can still use those same endpoints as tools. What would be the argument for "you don't need MCP when implementing new stuff"?
  - neya 1y ago
    I think you're confusing implementing MCP for your own software offering/Saas, which is different and I think you should do it, vs implementing third party MCP servers into a Saas backend, which is what I'm talking about. Because, to do the latter, the standard design is one hosted MCP server per vendor. If you use more than even 5, that's a lot of servers to maintain in a Saas context.
    - atonse 1y ago
      ah that's a great point. noted.
knowaveragejoe 1y ago
This is a really nifty CLI tool that lets you fit an LLM into a shell environment. Check out examples like piping context into and out of the `llm` command. https://github.com/simonw/llm https://github.com/simonw/llm
- ezekiel68 1y ago
  Thanks! Since commenting, I've discovered sst/opencode on GitHub as well (and Gemini CLI came out as an aspiring competitor to Claude Code too).

neya 1y ago

I meant to say that MCP is just a wrapper around good old function/tool calling, it's not a new superpower by itself. So, if you're designing a Saas, you don't need to use MCP yourself, you can just use good old function/tool calling. To answer your specific queries, I use the autocomplete in VS Code and I directly chat with ChatGPT-o3 for advanced problems because my background is in Elixir and most models that are hyped up fail badly with Elixir. I'm always a huge fan of o3 as it can solve the most complex problems I throw at it..

atonse 1y ago
Yes, but if I'm implementing "good old function/tool calling" today, why would I not implement it as MCP? I suppose it complicates things? MCP, in addition to being tooling endpoints, would also open up my software to a rapidly growing ecosystem that requires minimal additional work. AND I can still use those same endpoints as tools. What would be the argument for "you don't need MCP when implementing new stuff"?
- neya 1y ago
  I think you're confusing implementing MCP for your own software offering/Saas, which is different and I think you should do it, vs implementing third party MCP servers into a Saas backend, which is what I'm talking about. Because, to do the latter, the standard design is one hosted MCP server per vendor. If you use more than even 5, that's a lot of servers to maintain in a Saas context.
  - atonse 1y ago
    ah that's a great point. noted.

knowaveragejoe 1y ago

This is a really nifty CLI tool that lets you fit an LLM into a shell environment. Check out examples like piping context into and out of the `llm` command. https://github.com/simonw/llm https://github.com/simonw/llm

ezekiel68 1y ago
Thanks! Since commenting, I've discovered sst/opencode on GitHub as well (and Gemini CLI came out as an aspiring competitor to Claude Code too).