The conversation around AI coding assistants keeps speeding up, and we are hearing the following questions from technology leaders:

• Which flavor do we bet on—fully-agentic tools (Claude Code, Devin) or IDE plug-ins (Cursor, JetBrains AI Assistant, Copilot)?
• How do we evaluate these tools?
• How do we effectively roll out these tools?

At the top level, I think about:

• Agentic engines are happy running end-to-end loops: edit files, run tests, open pull requests. They’re great for plumbing work, bulk migrations, and onboarding new engineers to a massive repo.
• IDE assistants excel at tight feedback loops: completions, inline explanations, commit-message suggestions. They feel safer because they rarely touch the filesystem.

Here’s a pretty good roundup:

The Best AI Coding Tools, Workflows & LLMs for June 2025.

Most teams I work with end up running a hybrid—agents for the heavy lifting, IDE helpers for day-to-day quick work items.

Whichever path you take, the practices you use matter the most.

Some examples to get you started:

• Publish a living coding-guidelines file before you turn agents loose—JetBrains’ Junie team shows a good pattern.
  Coding Guidelines for Your AI Agents
• Keep the agent’s toolchain fast and observable; Armin Ronacher’s post explains why slow tests and verbose logs burn tokens and patience alike.
  Agentic Coding Recommendations
• Reset context often—Philipp Spiess’s rule of thumb is “/clear when you change topics.”
  How I Use Claude Code
• Pair early adopters with skeptics and share metrics (time-to-PR, diff size). Thomas Ptacek’s rant is the best antidote to “LLMs are a fad.”
  My AI Developer Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts

Reading list

• Why Developers Should Care about AI-Enabled Software Engineering – A breezy primer you can forward to any hold-outs who think AI is “just for AI people.”
• My AI Developer Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts – A punchy takedown of common objections and a reminder that agents ≠ copy-paste ChatGPT.
• How I Use Claude Code – Real-world workflow tips: when to “/clear,” how to fork threads, and a cheeky alias for yolo mode.
• Agentic Coding Recommendations – Armin Ronacher on keeping loops token-efficient and why Go beats Python for agents.
• How Anthropic Teams Use Claude Code (PDF) – Department-by-department case studies and a template for your own “Claude.md” grounding file.
• Coding Guidelines for Your AI Agents – How to bake language-specific dos & don’ts into a .junie/guidelines.md file so agents spit out idiomatic code.