My Wild Ride Through AI Development Tools (Or: How I Landed Back at Cursor)

I've been testing AI development tools with real projects, not surface-level reviews. This piece covers the space between no-code platforms and pure IDEs — specifically where Cursor, Google AI Studio, and a newcomer called Antigravity IDE compete for the same workflow slot. The landscape shifted dramatically between December 2025 and March 2026. What felt settled got complicated fast. I ran actual benchmark tasks across all three tools and tracked the numbers. Here's what the full post covers: Why Google AI Studio is underrated for prototyping — Gemini 3 Pro enables quick deployment, but there are hard limits most reviews don't surface. I found out the hard way Antigravity IDE's agent-first architecture — benchmark score of 0.69+, free public preview, and a reliability problem I hit in February that completely changed my take How Cursor actually compares on cost vs. output — benchmark 0.751, but ~$28 per task. I ran the same work through Claude Code CLI ($1.60–$4/task)