So, somewhere in the middle of February, Anthropic released Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, which people immediately jumped onto and used it in Cursor (or the editor of choice).
However, there was another tool released that day - Claude Code. It was just a limited research preview. It took another few weeks before it gained enough traction. The crowd got a new ✨ shiny ✨ tool. And they loved it.
What it is?
Claud Code is another take on an AI code agent/assistant. Nevertheless, in contrast to Cursor or Windsurf, where the agent lives in the IDE next to your code, Claud Code works from the command line.
This has its benefits and drawbacks.
Benefits
The biggest benefit I see is that you can run it everywhere. Do you use Jetbrain’s WebStorm? Are you an Atom fan? Vim enthusiast? You are no longer bound to the editor just to use the AI effectively.
However, there is a reason why almost all IDEs on the planet look the same way. It’s ergonomic and effective. You have your code, you can quickly navigate between files, search, etc.
Drawbacks
I’m missing the ability to review the changes in IDE, jump between multiple files to see the connections and logic, and modify the code in place if I deem so. This is all available in Cursor.
The whole ergonomics is a bit off. For example, you cannot ⌥+Backspace to delete a whole word from the prompt. You cannot ⌘+← jump to the beginning of the line. Wanna insert a newline? Write (not press) \ and then press Enter. Yep. You are writing commands now. It’s your job to do the formatting!
How is it?
I’ve been using Claude Code for a few days now on a personal project. So, how is it?
What others think…
Before I share my view, let’s first look at what the crowd is saying.
Most of the time, the feedback is positive. Anthropic did an amazing job with the tool and the Claude 3.7 Sonnet model. It’s great in one-shotting the solutions. It has a great step-by-step approach, and the output is a bit better overall than when using the same prompt in Cursor.
However, it’s not all roses.
Most complaints mention high costs and issues when working on unit tests. Sometimes, when Claude Code tries to fix them, it “cheats” by making the tests pass every time. This works if all you want is green checkmarks… But it’s scary and puts even more pressure on reviewing the generated code. It’s great to keep that in mind.
What I think…
Well… It was a game changer. And likely not in a way you think. My previous flow was:
Write prompt for Cursor.
Wait for the code to be generated.
Review the code.
Rinse and repeat.
Maybe it’s just me, but the code generation is slow. Really slow! In that time, I either prepared the next prompt or researched online. I was limited to one chat per codebase. (I understand that technically I could run multiple Cursor instances, but who has the resources to do that?)
Claude Code gave me a resource-undemanding option to run multiple agents at once. As long as you keep editing different parts of the app, you can spin up as many of them (I’m using two at the moment). This saves tons of time during the development.
I agree with the crowd that the output code is better and cleaner. It also understands more vague and broad prompts. It’s better at understanding what you wanna do.
I’m not seeing huge costs. (Hey man, you are an engineer, likely earning a top salary in your country. Is a few bucks really expensive?) The biggest drawback for me is the ergonomics.
Summary
Claude Code is an interesting take on the agentic AI code assistant. I hope they improve the ergonomics. But even now, I’m integrating Claude Code into how I work, and I’ll be testing it even further.
