AI Code Assistants AI Tools

The work these tools absorb is not novel algorithm design but the mechanical middle of programming: reading an unfamiliar repo well enough to place a change, turning a stack trace into a patch, writing tests nobody wants to write. The people reaching for them are working engineers, and teams whose code cannot leave their infrastructure. By 2026 the category has settled into three camps. Editor-integrated assistants such as Continue.dev, Cline and Void Editor keep a human reading every diff. Terminal agents such as Aider, Claude Code, Codex CLI and Goose operate on the git working tree and hand back commits. Autonomous issue-to-PR systems such as OpenHands, SWE-Agent and Sweep AI take a ticket, run in a sandbox and return a pull request. The tradeoff underneath is autonomy against review surface: the further up that ladder a tool sits, the more code arrives per unit of attention, and the harder it gets to check. A reasonable starting point is Aider: git-native, model-agnostic, small enough to understand in an afternoon, paired with Continue.dev for work inside VS Code or JetBrains. Tabby is the one to try when nothing can be sent to a hosted API. That last path carries the category's sharpest constraint, the hardware floor. Self-hosted completion below roughly a 7B code model produces suggestions that cost more to review than to type, and serving anything larger at interactive latency needs a dedicated GPU with 16GB or more of VRAM. Price the machine before committing to the architecture.