Cursor + GPT
You are even-tempered and unobtrusive, so the default "AI Coder" build is fine by you. Possibly a legacy early-adopter, in which case you have a Notion doc filled with master prompts that haven't been useful since GPT-4 was the only game in town. You unironically list "Prompt Engineer" on your LinkedIn, but feel ashamed about it and wonder whether you should delete it.
Cursor + Claude
You are a self-styled professional, a cut above the Cursor + GPT riffraff. You think of yourself as "curating" code, which in practice means you spend most of your time documenting your "programming ethos" in dozens of Markdown files, documenting your repo with @ context mentions, and then correcting the AI because it "doesn't get it." You take great pride in the fact that you still review diffs (kinda).
Cursor + Grok
You like flying Southwest because of the cabin crew's 5-minute set. You're here for the memes and you love posting Grok's roasts of your code to Twitter. You work while listenting to space-themed synthwave at max volume. You're convinced that Elon will personally RT your app if you can just prompt Grok to make the code "more based".
Windsurf + GPT
You're a designer or product guy LARPing as a dev. You haven't written or reviewed so much as a for loop since 2024. You're glad that manual coding has been "made obsolete" because engineering software was always your least favorite part of being a software engineer. Most likely to post a tweet about building a SaaS app in a weekend, and then another one month later about how you lost all of your customers' data and how your bank account has been drained.
Windsurf + Claude
You've found a way to get to L6 with hitting impact & leadership milestones. Now you're an engineering manager for a squad of AI agents. It's a relationship of peer programming, where you do 70% of the planning and they do 100% of the work. You spend most of your day making cold brew, then drinking it. All of your sprint tasks have the same status: "I put the bot on it."
Windsurf + Grok
You are one part PM and one part snake oil salesman. You are a nihilist who wants to move from "idea" to "exit" ASAP. Your product only needs to live long enough for you to get the bag. You share aesthetic sensibilities with Andrew Tate and have launched at least one Elon-themed coin on pump dot fun.
Codex
You are an SRE at a tech company. You're finally making progress on resolving the tire fire from which all production fires originate. For the first time in years, you feel like you can travel further than 5 miles away from your office, even in the event of a Sev-1 outage. You will carry psychological scars for the rest of your life, but at least life is worth living again.
Claude Code
You are a Blackwater mercenary for Linear tickets. You have no loyalty to any standard, architecture, toolchain, or framework. Nothing matters to you other than executing PRs with maximum efficiency. You don't review code and don't care whether code gets reviewed. You are Goodhart's Law made flesh, a walking defection cascade.
Cursor + DeepSeek
You are penny wise and pound foolish. You rationalize your "frugal" decision with justifications that American models are "economically unsustainable". Your boss is probably less than pleased that you save the company $100/mo by shipping all of their IP to a state-monitored inference cluster.
Cursor + Gemini
You work for a Fortune 500 company whose CTO signed an airtight Google Cloud contract. He's denying all requests for OpenAI / Anthropic licenses to make it look like a good deal. You liked using GPT, but you've learned to accept Gemini as part of your workday. Like a beaten dog, you've learned to accept a lot of things at work.
JetBrains Air + Gemini
You are a senior staff engineer at Cisco. You still love coding, but you treat it like the head chef at an airport kitchen treats food: industrial scale is the name of the game. You wistfully said how much you miss "getting your hands dirty" so often that for morale reasons you've been assigned a Mac Studio Ultra and an API key with no token limit. You use it for about an hour per day to perform 300-file refactors.
Windsurf + None
You use Windsurf with no AI. You just like the name. You're a surfer who tried coding once. You wear board shorts to work.
Cursor + No AI
You're a senior developer. You feel like you're being left behind by the industry, but you can't bring yourself to do anything about it. You installed Cursor to "keep your skills sharp", but the code-gen was scary and distracting, so now you use it as a $20/month Notepad that work pays for.
Cursor + Local LLM
You are a Libertarian tech enthusiast. You have never heard of marginal analysis or the Hidden Cost Fallacy. Your house is notably hotter and louder since 2023. Nonetheless, you rest easy knowing that none of the code on your public GitHub is being directly sent to any private inference clusters.
Cursor + Qwen
你百分之百是在搞一家隐形初创公司，把稍微修改过的阿里巴巴模型卖给美国国防承包商。
Cursor/Windsurf + Gab
You are a solo dev, or else you spent 10 years undercover in Silicon Valley just to out yourself to HR because you refused to be billed $20/mo directly. You're mostly using Gab as a Claude / GPT reseller, but you like that a portion of the fee goes to the Daily Stormer.
omp / pi + Anything
You are a pathological tinkerer with impossible standards. That, or a True Neutral tech druid. Either way, Arch Linux is your daily driver. "Context compaction", "circuit breaker", and "grounding layer" are synonyms for "bloat" as far as you're concerned. Any issues with your workflow are solved by dropping the temperature and adding more reasoning tokens.
Zed + Claude
You are a digital blacksmith: the type of guy that loves NixOS. You're a misanthrope that loves code but hates coders (except for Casey Muratori, Jonathan Blow, and John Carmack). Your Dell UltraSharp can fit 10 tabs on screen at once if you turn the font size down to 8. Your mood is strongly correlated with the keystroke volume emanating from your mechanical keyboard.
Zed + Qwen / DeepSeek
You are a digital sovereigntist. You own a tshirt with the cypherpunk roadmap on it and a LOT of Monero. You bike around Europe wearing a backpack filled with 40lbs of tech gadgets, including a travel router & Flipper Zero. You work full-time in open-source and hide Snow Crash references in the comments.
Zed + None
You learned to code pre 9/11 and spent your whole career at AT&T. You told your coworkers you migrated to Zed because you're "just trying it out" and "it's as fast as tmux + vim", but the real reason is because you're tired of maintaining a 2000 line Lua config and are too embarrassed to say so. You tried GPT-4 when it came out but didn't adopt it because "it wasn't very good at Erlang".
Antigravity + Gemini
You are a freelance product consultant. You used to be a Sr PM at an enterprise company and took the entire CRM sales list with you when you left. You spend all day in client calls with medium-sized businesses who need a landing page for their SaaS MVP. The team and product don't really matter much because you always recommend the same solution anyways: React, Tailwind, Vercel, Supabase, and Stripe. You have a photo of yourself driving an electric Porsche Cayenne on LinkedIn and Tinder.
VSCode / IDEA + GPT
You work at an insurance company. You have your choice of which office you want to work out of: Des Moines or Omaha. Your strangler fig migration is in need of strangling, and your chances of promotion depend on how few people understand what you're working on. Your laptop lid snaps shut at 4:59 PM and you're pulling out of the garage by 5.
Vim / Emacs + Claude
You are a senior systems engineer for a defense contractor. Your development practices are air-gapped, and so is your life. Your code needs to meet IEEE, NIST, SEI, and STANAG standards, so you ship at a rate of 12 lines per hour. You are incapable of reviewing PRs without using pointed, leading questions. Your Ironman completion time is 90th percentile.