The best AI workbench is not an IDE

There is a common beginner mistake in AI-assisted development: picking a single tool and asking it to do everything. That is how people end up defending editors as if they were operating systems. An editor is not a strategy. It is a window. What matters is the execution surface behind the window: authentication, tool access, agent reliability, MCP, and whether team knowledge can survive a change of shell. After using Cursor, Cursor CLI, IntelliJ IDEA with AI Assistant wired to external providers, IntelliJ with Kilo Code, and Codex CLI, I arrived at a.