An Opinionated Guide on the Best AI Coding Tools in 2025 | Colin Matthews
Picking the best tool amongst Bolt, v0, Lovable, Replit, Cursor, and Windsurf from prototyping to production apps
Dear subscribers,
Today, I want to share a new episode with Colin Matthews.
There are so many AI coding tools that it’s hard to know where to start. That’s why I partnered with Colin (taught 1,000+ students to build AI apps) to demo and find the best tool for each use case:
Text to prototype
Figma to prototype
JavaScript game
Full-stack personal app
Professional development
We gave Bolt, v0, Lovable, Replit, Cursor, and Windsurf the same prompts and got some surprising results. Watch the video to see them for yourself:
Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
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Colin and I talked about:
(06:43) Text-to-prototype: Bolt vs. V0 vs. Lovable vs. Replit
(09:09) The surprising winner for Figma-to-prototype
(17:30) Building a “2D Zelda” game in a single prompt
(24:28) Professional development: Cursor vs. Windsurf
(32:57) The best AI coding tools for each use case
(35:34) Our best predictions for the AI coding market
(39:29) Can non-engineers really build production apps with AI?
Text to prototype: Bolt for speed and flexibility
Bolt is our pick here. When prototyping, you want something that looks great to show to users ASAP. Bolt was by far the fastest in our testing:
Bolt excels at rapid iteration. It can often generate great looking prototypes in 15 seconds or less.
V0 likes a specific aesthetic. It makes everything look like ShadCN UI whether you want that style or not.
Lovable targets beginners. Its visual editor is nice but editing code was cumbersome and feedback on its 2.0 update has been mixed.
Replit takes the longest. It creates both client and server code which is great for production apps but overkill for prototypes.
Figma to prototype: Bolt surprises us again
Bolt is our winner again. Competitors had a head start with Figma integrations, but Bolt produced the most faithful reproductions of Figma designs. It also makes the best looking landing pages thanks to its recent design update.
Bolt produced faithful prototypes. It matched our Figma design better than any competitor.
V0 likes to re-theme designs. Again, it tends to make everything ShadCN UI instead of reflecting your actual design.
Lovable performed inconsistently. Lovable created a better prototype from a screenshot than Figma.
Games: Replit gets you to fun in one shot
Replit shocked us here. I’ve been vibe coding games with Cursor but have to admit Replit was much better at making games in a single prompt. We asked each tool to “create 2D Zelda”:
Replit built a functional Zelda clone. It had combat, terrain, and even enemy AI.
Windsurf made a great UX but lacked functionality. The graphics looked great but we couldn’t move our character.
Cursor got the basics but lacked polish. It created a square that we could move but lacked the visual fidelity of Replit.
Firebase Studio completely flopped. It produced nothing more than a red square that you couldn’t interact with.
Although Replit’s agent took longer, it produced the best results by far. We were impressed by how it checks its own work with screenshots.
Full-stack personal app: Replit one shots it again
Replit was the best again. Like the game example, it was the only tool that built a complete habit tracking app in one shot.
Replit nailed the full stack. It built an app with navigation, data persistence, and visualizations that felt nearly ready to ship.
Cursor handled the basics well. It generated decent UI with data entry, but the app’s server and navigation felt limited.
Windsurf struggled with design. It created a visually confusing interface with mock data and limited functionality.
Firebase Studio faltered again. It produced only the word "goals" on screen. Google definitely needs to bake this tool more.
To be fair, our focus so far has been on building a game or app with a single prompt. For more iterations, you might want to look at…
Professional dev: The Cursor vs. Windsurf debate
This one’s a genuine toss-up. Cursor and Windsurf are neck-in-neck so I asked the teams behind each product to highlight their own strengths. Here’s what they said:
Cursor
Most popular by far. Cursor is adopted by 7M developers and the Fortune 1000.
Fast, accurate tab completion. Professional devs use “tab” more than the agent.
Explains more what it’s doing. It tends to communicate more what it’s doing instead of just jumping straight to code.
Windsurf
Large context awareness. It’s designed to handle large code bases well.
Enterprise-grade security. FedRAMP certified with HIPAA compliance, self-hosting options, and zero-data retention by default.
Cheaper than Cursor. It’s $15/month vs. Cursor’s $20/month.
The race between these two is incredibly close. It’ll be interesting to see if Windsurf gets acquired by OpenAI and how that changes things (P.S. I’m interviewing Varun, Windsurf’s CEO this week. Sign up to my YouTube to get the full conversation soon).
Dark horse AI candidates worth watching
Outside of the major players, there are a few dark horse candidates worth watching:
Magic Patterns streamlines user feedback. You can share your prototype via a link and easily prompt users to fill out a feedback form.
HeyBoss tries to generates a full app in one shot. Like Replit, HeyBoss’ agent takes longer but tends to one-shot apps. It also has some quirky design choices.
Cline is an open source VS code alternative. It works in your existing IDE and tries to be a more collaborative than Cursor/Windsurf (e.g., it asks more questions).
Claude Code works in your terminal. The consensus seems to be that it generates better code quality than AI coding IDEs but is much more expensive.
Devin acts as an autonomous AI engineer. It can independently run code bases, search the web, and test in browsers. Claire Vo swears by it.
So which AI coding tool should you use?
Here's a recap of our favorite AI coding tools for each use case:
Text to prototype: Bolt
Figma to prototype: Bolt
Building Javascript games: Replit
Full-stack personal apps: Replit
Do you agree with our picks? Let us know in the comments and don’t forget to watch my full interview with Colin for a live demo of each tool.
This is an amazing primer! I am going to share this far and wide because people are so confused and misled on this topic. What would be very useful, and something right up your alley Peter, would be a product manager agent for noobs that could talk to you about what you want to build and translate noob input into technical language: e.g. protected routes, data storage, etc. Or if you even need a backend: sometimes I want to create an HTML/CSS prototype of an app for demo purposes and I'll see the AI tool is creating API endpoints 😂 — also, glad to see Replit comes out so strong, I agree with that!
Great summary. Thanks for sharing the observations