Sophomore Slump or Comeback of the Year
It's wild to think it's been 6 months since I got heavily into AI-assisted/vibe coding. Let's talk about three tools out there and what I've learned along the way.
IDEs and such
There are quite a few IDEs and outright coding agents out there. Claude makes a very powerful one in Claude Code, Google doesn't want to be left out with Antigravity, Amazon has Kiro, plus an assortment of others. Let's take a look through a few of these.
Kiro
Kiro was the first real vibe coding tool I used from before it was cool. I played with others, but my first deployed, vibe-coded website was built in Kiro with a combination of vibe and spec. Since it was first pushed out, it has done a few important things.
- You can choose a model OR you can let it choose. It uses an ambiguous "credit" system where letting it choose and do subagents is the cheapest but you can to the recently (as of March 2026) released Claude Opus 4.6 at a rate of 2.2x multiplier credits.
- Subagents? It does subagents now for certain tasks which seems to help optimize the credit usage, but that's more speculation than hard numbers
- Autonomous Agent - this is still getting rolled out, but Autonomous Agent is simply giving it a Github repo with issues and letting it work through them as its own speed and opening appropriate PRs for a human to review. It's very cool - when it works. This is still in its growing up phase, for sure.
Claude Code
Boy howdy, I was two scoops into Kiro for everything when a couple of colleagues forced, I mean, highly encouraged me to try Claude Code directly through CLI. I am glad I did. It makes a lot of good assumptions, uses a consistent model, and indicates to others when it's being used (as a collaborator on Github, for instance). I recently even used it for making a simple party invite page with a theme and it did an excellent job of layout, UI, and design. I didn't even touch the code until I copied a final .html into an S3 bucket (I am too nervous to give it AWS creds yet) and got a site.
My biggest qualm with Claude is that it is token hungry - there's not a good way to optimize, it just eats through them. I wish it had an "auto" mode that it could leverage optimized models. I should also invest more time in learning custom agents so that I could optimize it myself - a study for another time.
Antigravity
Google's offering is...strange to me. It has a lot of similarities to Kiro but seems to be lagging behind in efficiency. The UI is a modified VS Code, like Kiro, but with the free level it seems to not produce similar quality results to Kiro. Maybe I am just lucky or not doing a straight apples-to-apples comparison, but I am unimpressed with where it sits today. However, Google has been doing a lot of good work with Gemini, so perhaps a couple more rounds of bug fixes and we'll be there!
Summary
In this short, non-AI generated article, I wanted to take a look at the tools occupying my hard drive and show off what I've learned and what pitfalls I've found with each. Day to day, I'll still be mostly using Kiro, but Claude is showing up more and more. Antigravity needs a little more time in the oven, I feel, to really play ball with the others.
