The Apps for Coding before o3 (April 2025)

Mason James

Mason James

— 2 min read

In anticipation of OpenAI's release of the full o3 model later this week. I thought I'd take a few minutes to reflect on the current state of coding with AI and mention a few of the practical solutions I've been testing (and had success with) over the past ~6 months. It's been an exciting time, especially for someone who isn't a coder. Tools like Cursor, Windsurf, Repo Prompt, Claude Code, v0, Lovable, Bolt, and Manus have reshaped my understanding of what's possible.

Is this hype? It certainly exists in this space in abundance. But under the hype there is powerful enablement for those willing to explore. In the past week I've been able to make my first commit to an popular open-source app, build an admin dashboard that an ops team now uses in production on Vercel, and begun building a web-based game inspired by my real-life work running a orchid farm.

Ahead of what I believe will be a fundamental shift with o3-Pro, let's briefly overview these tools.

As I've said before, I'm not a coder. I don't write code professionally or as a hobby. I have spent 2 decades in web tech as a founder, but not a coder. When AI came for marketing copy it wasn't a big deal to me. Creating image assets? Yeah, very cool but not earth shattering. The reason for me, I think, is that I'm already decent at writing and reviewing marketing copy and images and so while it helped me improve a bit (I'm definitely not a graphic designer either) the "leveling up" was happening more on the organizational/administrative side, also providing some valuable tweaks/rewording and brainstorming sessions which I found a lot of fun and super-helpful.

The AI Coding is different for me because I have no ability to code. Working with tools like Cursor, Windsurf, Repo Prompt, Claude Code, v0, lovable, bolt, manus, the list is long and I've tried them all. So let's do a quick breakdown of what's worked and how ahead of what I believe will mark a fundamental shift in what's possible with coding. Especially if an o3-Pro is in the works we can likely expect massive shifts in the software engineering space.

In upcoming articles, I’ll share specific insights, including how Cursor turned debugging into something I look forward to, why Repo Prompt forever changed the way I manage my codebases, and the exact scenarios where Claude Code becomes your coding superpower. I've divided them up into 4 posts and links will be live here as they are published:

  • Best Practices: These quick tips ensure you get the results you want from any of these apps.
  • Cursor: My thoughts on the app that defined this space. A look at Windsurf as well.
  • Repo Prompt: This app is my true coder champion. Read on to learn how to use this effectively.
  • Claude Code: Connect your code with the chatbots. Genius optimizer, rapid code generation. (Coming Soon)
  • v0, Bolt, Lovable, Manus: Quick prototyping and early-stage development. (Coming Soon)

In the next article, I’ll unpack the single biggest mistake I made when starting with AI coding tools and explain how steering clear of it can save you days of work.

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