The Build Report
Honest reviews of the tools you build AI software with.
Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, MCP servers, Obsidian — reviewed by people who use them daily, sourced on every claim, and never paid for. No sponsored placements, ever.
01 — The reviews
Start with whichever tool you're already deciding on.
Every card renders straight from the review collection — the index and the articles cannot drift apart.
Claude Code, honestly: what it is and who it's for
A genuinely capable terminal-first coding agent — best for developers who already live in a shell, not for anyone who wants a GUI to hold their hand.
Cursor vs Claude Code vs Windsurf: which AI coding tool fits which developer
These aren't three flavors of the same thing — they're a forked IDE, a terminal agent, and (as of this year) an agent-management desktop app formerly called Windsurf. Pick by workflow, not by hype.
MCP servers explained: the useful ones worth wiring up
MCP is a real, spreading standard — but half the 'official server' links in older blog posts point at repos Anthropic has since archived. Check what's actually maintained before you wire anything in.
Getting real work out of AI agents: a practical setup
The gap between an agent that looks productive and one that actually is comes down to one thing: whether it can verify its own work before telling you it's done.
Obsidian as a developer's second brain
A genuinely good fit for developers specifically because it's just plain Markdown files on disk — the plugin ecosystem and sync pricing are where you'll actually make tradeoffs.
Claude Code vs GitHub Copilot: which fits which workflow
Copilot is the safer default if you already live inside GitHub's PR workflow and want inline completions in your editor; Claude Code is the better fit once you want a scriptable, hook-driven terminal agent — and at Copilot's top tiers, it literally bundles Claude Code as an included third-party agent, so check what you already have before paying for both.
Notion vs Obsidian vs Logseq for developers
These are three different bets on where your notes should live — a proprietary cloud database, plain Markdown files, and plain Markdown/Org files with an outliner-first model — and the right pick depends on whether you want your notes to be git-able more than you want built-in team collaboration.
AI note-taking tools worth paying for
The tools worth paying for are the ones where the AI feature does one specific, checkable job — transcribe a meeting, ground an answer in documents you actually uploaded — not the ones promising a general-purpose 'AI second brain' with no way to verify what it got wrong.
02 — From the same team
We also build the templates we review the categories for.
Vaultsmith sells Obsidian and Claude Code templates, including the Second Brain OS vault this site's Obsidian review points to.
Visit Vaultsmith store