> Im building a startup MVP on a tight 3-week timeline and trying to decide between licensing a tool that excels at codebase-wide refactoring vs one thats just really good at fixing runtime errors. Saw this thread earlier and wanted to warn you about the hidden costs here. When I was rushing to push my last SaaS MVP in under a month, I fell into the trap of paying for a heavy multi-file planning tool. Be very careful with those. Codebase-wide planning sounds amazing on paper, but in reality, it burns through API tokens like crazy. You will end up spending hundreds of dollars on context window usage alone because the agent keeps reading your entire repo for every minor change. I ended up switching to a cheaper setup using DeepSeek Coder API Pay-As-You-Go combined with basic local scripts, and it saved me a ton of cash. For a 3-week timeline, I would suggest keeping it simple. Go with the debugging focus. Multi-file refactoring agents usually hallucinate imports and break database schemas, which takes hours to manually undo. Real-time debugging is much tighter and keeps your costs predictable since it only looks at the error stack trace and the active file. Basically, make sure you dont bleed money on token costs before you even launch. Get something that fixes what is broken right in front of you.

For a three-week MVP timeline, I would absolutely prioritize self-debugging. I was in a similar spot last month trying to launch a feature quickly and realized that multi-file planning is nice but it often gets bogged down in context limits. Getting fast, real-time error fixing saved my sanity. Here is what worked well for me to keep costs down and speed up:

• Go with Cursor Pro Subscription 20 dollars per month because the inline chat and terminal debugging are incredibly fast for fixing runtime errors.
• Pair it with the Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet API for when you need to feed large error logs. It works amazingly well and is very cheap.
• Don't waste time on complex agents. Just paste the terminal error directly into the AI chat. I've been using this setup for a while now with no complaints at all. It honestly just works. Let me know if you need help setting up the system prompts to get the best debugging output, I can share what I use.

> Which agent skill is more critical I'm not totally sure but over the years I've found planning tools to be pretty risky. I think debugging is safer because autonomous refactoring usually breaks existing dependencies.