The AI coding tool landscape in 2026 has finally settled into four serious players: Claude Code , Cursor , GitHub Copilot , and Windsurf . I've used all four on real work. This is the honest comparison. Forget feature checklists. What matters is how each tool feels under real engineering work, the kind I do every day as a senior software engineer at Meta. I built this site primarily with Claude Code, but I’ve put serious hours into the others.
Boris Cherny created Claude Code. When he shared how he actually uses it day-to-day, the setup was surprisingly simple. I went through every tip, tried most of them, and have opinions about all of them. The original thread is on Boris’s X account. A good companion site is howborisusesclaudecode.com which compiles everything in one place.
Obsidian + Claude Code is everywhere right now. But pointing an AI at a folder of markdown files and hoping for the best doesn't work. What matters is how you structure the knowledge base. Get that right, and Claude becomes genuinely useful. Get it wrong, and you get confident garbage. There’s been a wave of posts about this combo lately: James Bedford’s full walkthrough, Greg Isenberg’s “personal OS” approach, kepano (Obsidian’s CEO) sharing Claude Skills. They’re all worth reading.