Two weeks inside Windsurf and nothing else. Cascade reads the whole codebase before it writes, which is where Cursor still needs nudging file by file.

Four projects in, the split is clear. Landing pages and small apps come out clean; anything with real state or permissions falls apart fast.

Three months cost me $300. It saved eight hours in month one, five in month two, three in month three, and that curve is the real answer.

Bolt.new or v0 for a landing page. Cursor for a SaaS. Claude Code for an API. I built five project types with five tools, and the wrong pick costs hours.

The preview URL is the feature that matters. I rebuilt a hero three times in five minutes and had something I could show, not a screenshot.

Composer holds a 20-file refactor without dropping context, and my VS Code extensions still work. That combination is the whole pitch.

Eight minutes from blank to live prototype, no installs and no database setup. Replit Agent is the tool I hand to someone who has never deployed anything.

I asked v0 for a pricing table, a nav bar, and a dashboard card. All three came back production-ready with correct Tailwind classes in under a minute.

Lovable makes the cleanest data-heavy frontends I have tested – dashboards, charts, admin panels. The security defaults are a different story.

Replit Agent gets a prototype live with no setup. Past fifty files the browser IDE drags and file search crawls. I would not run a real product on it.