What AI Coding Tool to Use? A Sincere Founder-to-Founder Opinion for 2025

Let’s be honest. As founders, we don’t have time to become experts on every new AI tool that drops on Twitter. We have a product to build, customers to talk to, and a firehose of other problems to deal with.

So when it comes to the new wave of “vibe coding” tools, the question isn’t “what’s the coolest tech?” It’s “what’s going to help me ship a product and make money this week?”

I’ve seen the spectrum, from AI that writes single lines of code to platforms that build your entire business. Here’s my no-BS take on what to use in 2025, depending on the job to be done.

Scenario 1: You’re a Technical Founder with a Complex SaaS Product

You and your team are deep in the code. Your bottleneck is the sheer volume of work: features, bug fixes, tests, refactors.

My advice: Use OpenAI Codex as an autonomous coworker.

Forget basic code completion. The latest version of Codex integrated into ChatGPT is an agent. You assign it tasks, and it edits your repo, runs tests, and pushes fixes. It has a massive 192k context window. For a dev-founder, this is the highest leverage you can get. It’s not a crutch; it’s a tireless, multi-skilled engineer on your team that frees you up to think about architecture and strategy.

Scenario 2: You Have an Idea and Need a Polished MVP, Fast

You need to validate an idea, but you know that design and user experience matter. A clunky prototype won’t cut it.

My advice: Use Lovable.

This is the tool for building something that feels good, quickly. One prompt can get you a beautiful UI (you can even import from Figma), a real Supabase backend, and a Stripe paywall. Yes, you have to watch your credits (the $25/mo plan gives you 100 messages), but for shipping a micro-SaaS like PrintPigeon in three days, it’s unbeatable. It’s the fastest path from idea to a “lovable” product.

Scenario 3: You’re Building a Secure B2B Tool or Internal Dashboard

Your priority is security, data management, and reliability over pixel-perfect design. You need to manage user roles, view analytics, and you’d rather not duct-tape five different services together.

My advice: Use Base44.

Base44 is an all-in-one, secure ecosystem. It’s designed for building customer portals, lightweight CRMs, and other B2B tools where data visibility rules are critical. It’s a closed system, which means less flexibility, but also less to manage. For a founder building a tool to replace a clunky, expensive enterprise SaaS, Base44 is a direct path to a functional, secure alternative.

Scenario 4: You Want Flexibility and Long-Term Control

You’re a maker who is comfortable with code and knows you’ll eventually need to scale, customize, and own your stack completely.

My advice: Use the Replit AI Agent in its “Swiss-army workshop”.

Replit gives you the best of both worlds. The AI agent helps you plan your app and generates the starting repo, but then you have a full cloud IDE, terminal, and database GUI at your disposal. You can build anything, from a Next.js app to a Python game. With a huge community and the ability to export your code at any time, you never hit a wall. It’s the ultimate flexible workshop for founders who plan to go the distance.

The Bottom Line: Use a Hybrid Stack

Don’t marry one tool. Use the best one for the job at each stage.

1. Vibe a prototype in Lovable to get a polished UI and initial user feedback.
2. Export the code to GitHub.
3. Import into Replit to refine the logic and scale the backend, using the AI Agent or Codex to build out the complex parts.

That’s how you win in 2025. You combine the speed of high-abstraction tools with the power and control of code-level AI. Now go build something.