Avante, Bolt.new and Cursor: coding tools that are going to replace me next year
In this weeks issue: Avante is a great tool for bringing AI to Neovim. Also a comparison with Cursor and Bolt.new.
Coding tools for replacing me
The first thing that will be replaced are the current generation of AI tools; last in first out. However after that there are the professions that are the product of technology. Not least of all software developer, a practice that is well documented and can be carried out entirely using a keyboard.
The below tools are more developer aids than total replacements, but they can already replace developers for certain tasks. You can give your development team Cursor and let one of them go.
Alternatively you can let one developer go, but replace them with a specialist, thus expanding the breadth of your team's expertise. The economic effects of AI on developers are far from certain, but it's clear that we must adapt.
Cursor and Avante
Cursor is a visual studio fork that enables chat bots to perform various actions on your code base and appears to be the leader in this space. Avante is the same thing, but it is an Open Source plugin for Neovim. What you get with these:
I put off trying Cursor because I use Neovim and Emacs. I do a lot of development in a terminal over SSH and I hate ever having to reach for the mouse. I tried Cursor after using Avante just to check if it is significantly different and my conclusion is that I still hate Visual Studio. Meanwhile I was blown away by Avante.
I was not expecting it to work well without significant pain. However the first thing I tried was (using Claude 3.7) to add an IRC connector to an existing project. I asked it to base the IRC connector on the existing Slack connector which had a reasonable chunk of functionality. This required creating a new file and modifying several others. It completed the task with only a few minor bug fixes from myself.
The basic structure of the code was good and it saved me a lot of laborious work creating modules and wiring up interfaces. Claude did get very confused while trying to generate a configuration file. I had to fully figure that out on my own. So it did hit a clear limit, but it made significant progress beforehand.
Next I tried using it to create a Go based web app from scratch using HTMX and TailwindCSS. It managed to create the initial app without errors, I then iterated on the site's style and layout. This all worked wonderfully except for some highly verbose Tailwind code and a few instances where Avante got stuck.
The question is can I refuse to use them and still be competitive? Or will they actually make developers capable of debugging and writing novel code more in demand?
Bolt.new
Bolt hosts your app in addition to writing code, similar to Replit which also has an AI. It feels more like a developer replacement than an aide. The scope is much smaller and the tool is less complicated. It just allows creating web apps and doesn't appear to have all the code editing features of Cursor.
Tools like this, or ones that are even more focused, are the ones which can defer hiring a developer. Because if the tool can produce limited, but flawless apps, then a non-developer can use it for prototyping, internal tools or an MVP. Which is exactly how I use image generation and LLMs to replace other professionals.
However I used Bolt to create an Astro JS app and hit a bug which I couldn't figure out if it was in the generated code or Bolt. The Bolt editor is crappy compared to Neovim or Visual Studio, so for me this is just not worth the effort in figuring out what went wrong. With a tool like this, the second I have to start debugging using my own brain then it has lost its value.
Still though this is the kind of thing I would point less technical people to. Although I feel like Bolt doesn't go far enough to capture a non-technical audience. It falls into a middle ground between AI assisted Nocode/Lowcode and AI assisted coding.