At this point, I think I officially qualify for an AI Tools Support Group.
After reviewing my Gmail invoices, it turns out I'm paying for… well… a lot of AI tools. And yes, I definitely use all of them… for at least five minutes each.
Here's the current lineup in my "AI All-You-Can-Eat Buffet":
-
Claude Code → My absolute favorite for code generation and refactoring. It's like having a brilliant pair-programmer who never judges my bad variable names.
-
OpenAI Codex → Another CLI, because apparently one isn't enough.
-
Kiro AWS IDE → My current obsession. Spec-driven development done right.
-
Cursor IDE → Makes me think I'm a 10x developer. Spoiler: I'm not.
-
VS Code + AI Extensions → Where half of my tabs go to die.
-
Warp Terminal → Feels like coding inside a sci-fi movie.
-
Trae's Solo → Because why not have another AI IDE?
-
Google Gemini CLI → For those "just one more LLM" moments.
-
Amazon Q Developer → Like Alexa, but way nerdier.
Figure 1: Using AI to find AI tools I'm paying for. Inception?
Switching between all of them also has a side benefit: I get around usage limits on their built-in LLMs. (Yes, I'm basically the Netflix password sharer of AI.)
But the real star here is Kiro. I'm genuinely excited about the way it approaches spec-driven development. If more tools adopt this model, building software could feel less like debugging spaghetti code at 2AM and more like… actual engineering.
Yes, I used AI to audit my AI spending. The irony is not lost on me.
In the meantime, if you need me, I'll be over here explaining to my finance team (a.k.a. my wife) why I "need" nine different AI subscriptions to write the same "TODO task mgmt" app.
