What are the best AI tools out there for increasing Developer Productivity?

Here's some good related threads:

• "Which AI Agent or Code Editor Best Understands Code Context? (Comparison for Small, Mid-size, and Large Codebases)"
• "What's the best AI coding workflow?"

Honestly, I think you just need to talk to people and try stuff. Different people resonate with different explanation styles, and AI quality varies wildly based on the type of project you have. For example, I know some very good engineers who like Copilot. However, I hate it. Most of its auto-suggestions are useless alongside its AI pull request comments.

For me, I'm old-school and use ChatGPT. 4o is good for most use-cases, and o3 seems to be better at debugging (but is weirdly terrible at some basic use-cases). AI is inherently non-deterministic, so I think people just need to try as many as possible and find their flow.

Cursor and Windsurf are gaining a ton of traction as well.