The AI coding market split into three shapes: agents that own whole tasks (Claude Code), AI-native IDEs built for tight loops (Cursor, Windsurf), and autocomplete that meets you in your existing editor (Copilot).
Start from your unit of work
If you delegate features, you want an agent: it plans, edits across files, runs tests, and reports back. If you iterate line-by-line, an AI-native IDE keeps you in flow. If your team standardizes on one editor and reviews everything, autocomplete adds the least friction.
The pricing trap
Per-seat pricing looks cheap until usage-based model costs arrive. Estimate tokens from your actual workflow — an agent doing full features burns an order of magnitude more than autocomplete.
Try this
Run the same real ticket through one tool from each shape. The difference tells you more than any comparison table.