I tried the best AI coding tools so you don't have to

I’m doing a challenge to go from zero to a revenue-generating product in 6 weeks.

I’m way behind, it’s halfway and I just started building today 🙃

I landed on an idea last week. I’m building ProposalGPT — a tool to help consultants and agencies quickly generate proposals and scopes of work using AI.

The next step after picking an idea was choosing which AI tool to use to build it. Instead of overthinking it, I said I’d spend 30 mins vibe coding with the main AI coding tools and see which one produced the best output.

Here’s what I tested:

• Replit Agent v2

• Cursor

• Bolt

• Lovable

I gave each one the exact same initial prompt. The goal wasn’t to build the full ProposalGPT product, but to see how far I could get in a short session and whether I’d feel confident building the full thing there.

TLDR

Replit was the clear winner.

If you’re building a quick visual prototype, Bolt or Lovable might be best.

If you’re more technical and have time to experiment, Cursor could be the right choice.

But if you want to go from idea → working product → deployed app, Replit is your best bet.

Bolt & Lovable: Great for prototypes, not products

These two felt very similar. Both were fast and got me a basic interface very quickly.

But as soon as I started asking for anything slightly more advanced, things started breaking. Some features wouldn’t work, others worked halfway, and trying to fix them usually made things worse.

The troubleshooting experience wasn’t great either. Often felt like one step forward, two steps back.

I’d still recommend Bolt or Lovable if you just want to visualise an idea quickly. They’re perfect for prototyping or sharing early ideas. But for a functional product that someone would pay for, they’re the wrong choice.

Cursor: Powerful, but a bit too technical (for this challenge)

Cursor is clearly a powerful tool. You don’t need to be able to code to use it, but you do need to have a decent understanding of different technologies, frameworks, and programming languages to get the most out of it.

It generated a decent prototype for me, but it wasn’t smooth sailing. The UI it built was pretty rough, and trying to improve it with follow-up prompts didn’t get me very far. Troubleshooting became difficult, and I started running into gaps in my own technical knowledge.

I can definitely see the appeal of Cursor if you’re more experienced or have time to learn how to use it properly. But that’s not the point of this challenge — the goal is to get something built and shipped in six weeks. Cursor felt like the kind of tool I’d use if I wasn’t up against a tight deadline.

Replit: Winner, winner

Replit took the longest to return a working result, which initially had me thinking it might be a bad fit. But once it got going, it was the one I was most impressed with.

It wasn’t perfect, but unlike the other tools, I didn’t have to go back and forth constantly trying to fix things. It got most of the structure right, and the changes I needed could be handled through a few simple follow-up prompts.

Replit also stands out with deployment and hosting. It’s basically one click to get your app live. With Cursor, you’d need to push to GitHub and handle setup yourself. I didn’t even get that far with Lovable or Bolt.

Another big advantage with Replit is security. Because it handles the runtime and deployment environment for you, it enforces better defaults. I’ve seen a few projects built with Cursor or v0 that eventually had to be scrapped because bad security.

That’s it for now.

Replit is what I’ll be using to build ProposalGPT.

Next step: start actually building it.