This week's primary goal is to test some new LLM-powered coding tools. ⚔️ well, actually, maybe the primary goal is the code they are writing?
First up: ZenCoder. ⚙️ https://zencoder.ai
ZenCoder is a VSCode plug-in. Which makes it similar to everything else.
The "Generate Unit Tests" agent is quite nice. 💡 it is so good that it reveals the limits of progress. Instead of spending 25% of the time writing tests, I spend 5% of the time, and get 3x the test coverage. But ... that's still only a 20% decrease in time. No matter how good it is. The remaining 5% of the time is spent reading the tests 🔥 it almost makes unit tests fun! 💡 of course, unless you're checking the tests, it doesn't matter if they are there
Everything else feels unremarkable compared to Claude. But, it has one key feature that "uploading files to the Claude web interface" does not: diffs in VSCode.
ZenCoder is $19/month. For ... an unknown amount of usage.
I am on the "two week free trial", and have not hit a usage limit yet. But there is no sign of what those limits are, or how close I am to it.