For me, Claude Code was the most impressive innovation this year. Cursor was a good proof of concept but Claude Code is the tool that actually got me to use LLMs for coding.
The kind of code that Claude produces looks almost exactly like the code I would write myself. It's like it's reading my mind. This is a game changer because I can maintain the code that Claude produces.
With Claude Code, there are no surprises. I can pretty much guess what its code will look like 90% to 95% of the time but it writes it a lot faster than I could. This is an amazing innovation.
Gemini is quite impressive as well. Nano banana in particular is very useful for graphic design.
I haven't tried Gemini with coding yet but TBH, Claude Code does such a great job; if I could code any faster, I would get decision fatigue. I don't like rushing into architecture or UX decisions. I like to sit on certain decisions for a day or two before starting implementation. Once you start in a particular direction, it's hard to undo and you may try to double down on the mistake due to sunk cost fallacy. I try hard to avoid that.