Your Team Does Not Need Eight AI Coding Tools

Tool sprawl is the new tab sprawl, and it is costing you the same thing: depth.

समचरणदृष्टि विटेवरी साजिरी · Steady of Gaze, Beautiful upon the Brick

समचरणदृष्टि विटेवरी साजिरी । तेथें माझी हरी वृत्ति राहो ॥१॥
आणीक न लगे मायिक पदार्थ । तेथें माझें आर्त नको देवा ॥ध्रु.॥
ब्रह्मादिक पदें दुःखाची शिराणी । तेथें दुश्चित झणी जडों देसी ॥२॥
तुका म्हणे त्याचें कळलें आम्हां वर्म । जे जे कर्मधर्म नाशवंत ॥३॥
Let my mind rest steady at Hari's feet, so beautiful upon the brick — I need nothing else, no illusory thing; that is my one longing, Lord. The seats of Brahma and the other gods are only a chain of sorrow; let my distracted mind not cling there even a moment. Tuka says: this truth we have understood — all deeds and duties are perishable.

What I keep seeing

Last month I counted the AI coding tools installed across our engineering org. The number was seven. Copilot in VS Code. Cursor on half the frontend team. Claude Code on my terminal and two staff engineers' machines. One backend developer running Windsurf "to try it out." A contractor using Cody. Someone in DevOps had Devin running autonomously on a refactoring branch that nobody asked for. And a principal engineer who had quietly set up aider on a personal dotfiles repo and was using it for production work.

Nobody chose this. It accumulated. Each tool arrived with a Slack thread ("anyone tried this?"), a demo that looked magical, and a two-week honeymoon. Then the next tool dropped, and the honeymoon started again.

The real cost was not the seat licenses, though those added up to something uncomfortable. The real cost was that nobody on the team had gone deep on any single tool's configuration, context management, or prompt patterns. Everyone was a tourist everywhere.

The mechanics

AI coding tools are, underneath the UI chrome, retrieval-augmented generation systems with different context windows, embedding strategies, and tool-calling architectures. Copilot uses a Fill-in-the-Middle model tuned on your open tabs. Cursor builds a codebase index and lets you @ reference files into a chat context. Claude Code operates in your terminal with full shell access, reads your file tree, and calls tools in a loop. Windsurf layers "Flows," a multi-step agent on top of a similar context engine. Devin runs in a cloud sandbox with its own browser and terminal.

Each of these has different strengths. But those strengths only surface after you learn how the context window fills, what gets truncated, and how to shape your prompts and project files (.cursorrules, CLAUDE.md, .github/copilot-instructions.md) to steer the model. That learning takes weeks of daily use with feedback loops. You watch what the tool gets wrong, adjust your context files, and watch again.

When engineers switch tools every two weeks, they never reach the part of the curve where the tool becomes genuinely useful. They stay in the "autocomplete is pretty good" zone, which is the zone where every tool looks roughly identical and none of them justify their cost.

Where Tuka comes in

Tukaram is not arguing for asceticism for its own sake. He is making a mechanical observation: the act of chasing is itself the loss. Each new object of desire (मायिक पदार्थ, "illusory substance") does not just fail to satisfy; it actively displaces the one practice that would.

This is not metaphor for the tool-sprawl problem. It is the exact structure. The engineer who opens a Cursor tab while Claude Code is mid-generation is not evaluating; they are fragmenting their own learning signal. They will never develop the instinct for when Claude Code's terminal-first approach is stronger than Cursor's indexed-chat approach, because they never stayed with either long enough to feel the edges.

Tukaram's phrase "जे जे कर्मधर्म नाशवंत" (whatever actions and rituals are perishable) is a statement about attention budgets. Every tool evaluation that does not convert into committed depth is a perishable act. It felt productive. It produced nothing.

What I would actually do

Pick one AI coding tool per team (not per org, teams have different workflows), commit to it for a full quarter, and invest the first two weeks in writing project-level context files and team-specific prompt patterns. If you are a CLI-heavy backend team, that is probably Claude Code with a well-maintained CLAUDE.md. If you are a React frontend team living in the editor, Cursor with a tuned .cursorrules file is a defensible choice. Sunset everything else. The learning compounds only when the tool is the same tool tomorrow.

Chetan Dhandal