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.
• AWS Q for Developer → Like Alexa, but way nerdier.
Figure 1: Leveraging AI to find AI tools I'm playing 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 actually 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. 😅
Drop a comment with your AI tool count - let's see who wins this subscription race! 👇
