My motivation was mainly the fact that Bitbucket cut their free tier, and who knows how long GitHub will be free? So I tried and found out how easy git actually is to sync without third parties
Apparently for as long as it will enable Microsoft to profit by training its LLMs on people's code.
For people uncomfortable with working on free/libre stuff with git directly I always suggest Codeberg as an alternative, but hands on git is also an excellent option.
I got into embedded 10 years ago, there really is something about driving hardware directly that is just so rewarding.
For AI I've been using Cecli which is cli and can actually run the compile step then fix any errors it finds - in addition to using Context7 MCP for syntax.
Not quite 10x yet but productivity has improved for me many times over. It's just how you use the tools available
Cecli (pronounced like "Ceclily") is a new AI coding assistant. Originally forked from Aider but now over 1000 commits ahead of the old project, Cecli has evolved to be much more.
Now with MCP, tools, skills, built-in TODO list, repo map, ask-code workflow OR agentic OR in-line coding. Includes the git integration, auto linting and testing that you need.
Open Source, built with Python, actively developed.
Personally I use "agent mode" in Cecli for almost everything - I don't know about other AI coding agents but you can easily set up tests to run and validate the output.
Since MCP came out the quality of code has improved since there is always context7 and fetch to look up syntax.
But yes at some point you need to look at the code yourself just to be sure
