AJ Learning HubReference · compiled June 2026
AI editors · LLMs · domains · hosting · full-stack comparisons. The tools that build the modern web — and where each one fits.
The most-used AI editors right now (June 2026). Most pros run 2–3 together — Cursor for daily editing, Claude Code for complex tasks, and open-source agents for background automation.
The best overall AI code editor — 1M+ daily active users.
VS Code fork with Supermaven-powered autocomplete, multi-model support, and Composer for multi-file edits. Cursor 2.0 can orchestrate up to ~8 agents. The default for daily AI coding.
Cursor's closest rival — lowest friction to start.
Originally built by Codeium, now owned by OpenAI. The agentic 'Cascade' flow plus a gentle learning curve make it the top pick for beginners.
#1 on SWE-bench — correctness & terminal workflows.
Anthropic's CLI agent. Strongest SWE-bench scores for complex reasoning; it reads files, runs commands, and verifies its own work. Ideal for terminal-first devs. (This hub was built with it.)
Widest IDE support, SSO & audit trails.
The enterprise standard — works across the most IDEs with SSO and audit trails. Strong autocomplete plus chat and agent modes. No editor switch needed.
Google's agent-first IDE — up to 8 agents.
Google's agentic IDE (Gemini-powered) built for multi-agent coding — orchestrate several agents at once. Built on the VS Code base.
The fastest AI IDE — startup under 1 second.
A blazing-fast, Rust-built editor with AI features and sub-second startup. Best when raw speed and responsiveness matter most.
Open-source AI inside the universal editor.
Stay in plain VS Code and add open-source AI: Cline (5M+ installs) or Continue.dev. The best free, high-quality route with full control over your stack.
| Tool | AI built-in | Multi-file / agents | Free tier | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cursor | ✓ | ✓ Composer (8 agents) | ~ Limited | General coding |
| Windsurf | ✓ | ✓ Cascade | ✓ | Beginners |
| Claude Code | ✓ CLI | ✓ | ✗ | Code quality / terminal |
| GitHub Copilot | ✓ ext | ~ Limited | ✗ | Enterprise / teams |
| Antigravity | ✓ | ✓ up to 8 agents | ✓ preview | Multi-agent |
| Zed | ✓ | ~ | ✓ | Speed |
| VS Code + Cline | ✓ ext | ✓ (Cline) | ✓ | Free & quality |
The most-used models right now (June 2026) — closed source (API) vs open source (run it yourself).
Coding king — 80.8% SWE-Bench, ~1M-token context.
Anthropic's flagship and the #1 pick for coding and agentic work in 2026. Best-in-class SWE-Bench with a very long context window. Powers Claude Code.
Best all-round general intelligence & writing.
OpenAI's flagship — the go-to for general intelligence, writing, and broad tasks, with the largest tooling ecosystem.
Scientific research, reasoning & multimodal.
Google DeepMind's flagship — excels at scientific research, deep reasoning, and multimodal tasks, with huge context and strong price-performance.
Largest open community — up to 10M-token context.
Meta's open weights with the biggest community and ecosystem. Scout/Maverick variants push context up to ~10M tokens. Self-host or run via Ollama.
Top open model for coding agents.
A leading open-weights choice for coding agents in 2026 — strong tool use and function calling at open-source cost.
Cheapest path to frontier-level quality.
Open weights delivering near-frontier quality at the lowest cost. Self-hostable; popular for budget-conscious, high-volume use.
Where you buy and manage domain names (e.g. mysite.com). The domain is separate from hosting.
Dev favorite. Cheap, honest pricing, good UI.
Popular among developers. Transparent pricing, no dark patterns on renewal. Free WhoisGuard privacy. Solid DNS management. Great for personal projects and startups.
Most recognized name. But notorious for upselling.
Massive company, owns millions of domains. Good for non-techies. But known for aggressive upsells, confusing UI, and charging extra for privacy. Avoid if you know what you're doing.
At-cost pricing. Best if you already use Cloudflare.
Cloudflare sells domains at wholesale cost — no markup. Free privacy. Best DNS in the world. But you can mainly transfer existing domains rather than register every new TLD. Ideal for serious devs.
Formerly Google Domains. Now run by Squarespace.
Google Domains was beloved for simplicity, then sold to Squarespace in 2023. Clean UI, fair pricing. If you were on Google Domains, you're now on Squarespace Domains.
Quirky, cheap, great for .io and .ai domains.
A developer darling. Fun branding, genuinely cheap prices (especially for .io, .ai, .dev). Free WHOIS privacy. Good DNS management. Great for indie hackers and side projects.
Clean, no-upsell experience. Simple and honest.
A clean, no-nonsense registrar. No upsells, no confusion. Slightly pricier but great customer support. Good for people who hate the GoDaddy checkout maze.
How modern web apps are built — from database to framework to deployment.
Open-source Firebase alternative. Gives you a Postgres database, auth, storage, real-time subscriptions, and auto-generated REST + GraphQL APIs — all in one dashboard. Hugely popular for Next.js apps. Generous free tier.
Role → Database + Auth + Backend + Storage
The most popular React framework. Handles routing, server-side rendering, API routes, and static generation. By Vercel. Most production React apps use Next.js. Works perfectly with Supabase, Prisma, and Tailwind.
Role → Frontend Framework (React-based)
JavaScript runtime that runs on the server. Powers the backend of most JS apps. Express, Fastify, and NestJS are popular frameworks built on Node. Essential to understand — Next.js itself runs on Node.
Role → Backend runtime (server-side JavaScript)
Best place to deploy Next.js apps — made by the same team. Push to GitHub → auto-deploys in ~30 seconds. Handles edge functions, CDN, previews, custom domains. Free tier is excellent for side projects. Competes with Netlify.
Role → Frontend Hosting / Deployment
TypeScript ORM — talks to your database beautifully. Define your schema in a .prisma file, run migrations, and query your DB with type-safe code. Works with Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, MongoDB. Often paired with Supabase or PlanetScale.
Role → Database ORM / Query Layer
Packages your app and all its dependencies into a container that runs identically everywhere — your laptop, AWS, or a server in Germany. Standard in professional dev. Compose lets you run Postgres + Redis + your app with one command.
Role → Containerization / Dev Environment
Heroku alternatives. Deploy a backend (Node, Python, Go) or a Postgres DB with zero config. Railway is slicker; Render has a generous free tier. Both auto-deploy from GitHub. Perfect for fullstack apps that need a real backend server.
Role → Backend Hosting (servers, databases)
Utility-first CSS framework. Instead of writing CSS files, you compose classes in your JSX. Extremely fast to prototype. Used by the vast majority of modern Next.js projects.
Role → Styling / CSS Framework
Big cloud providers. AWS dominates with 200+ services. GCP is excellent for ML workloads. Azure dominates enterprise. Complex but infinitely scalable. Most startups start on Vercel+Supabase, then move to AWS at scale.
Role → Cloud Infrastructure (production at scale)
End-to-end typesafe API layer for TypeScript. Call your backend from the frontend as if it's a local function — no REST endpoints, no JSON serialization headaches. Pairs perfectly with Next.js + Prisma. The T3 Stack = Next + tRPC + Tailwind + Prisma.
Role → Type-safe API layer (TypeScript)
How all these tools connect into one request — from a user's click to a global cloud. The plain-English version of the whole stack.
Compiled June 2026 · comparisons are approximate · pricing changes frequently