[jjani]

> The biggest players in AI code today are full IDEs, not just extensions,

Claude Code (neither IDE nor extension) is rapidly gaining ground, it's biggest current limitation being cost, which is likely to get resolved sooner rather than later (Gemini Code anyone?). You're right about the right now, but with the pace at which things are moving, the trends are honestly more relevant than the status quo.

[andrewpareles]

Just want to share our thinking on terminal-based tools!

We think in 1-2 years people will write code at a systems level, not a function level, and it's not clear to us that you can do that with text. Text-based tools like Claude Code work in our text-based-code systems today, but I think describing algorithms to a computer in the future might involve more diagrams, and terminal will not be ideal. That's our reasoning against building a tool in the terminal, but it clearly works well today, and is the simplest way for the labs to train/run terminal tool-use agents.

[bcrosby95]

Diagrams are great at providing a simplified view of things but they suck ass when it comes to providing details.

There's a reason why fully creating systems from them died 20 years ago - and it wasn't just because the code gen failed. Finding a bug in your spec when its a mess of arrows and connections can be nigh impossible.

Go image search "complex unreal blueprint".

[andrewpareles]

This is completely true, and it's a really common objection.

I don't imagine people will want to fully visualize codebases in a giant unified diagram, but I find it hard to imagine that we won't have digests and overviews that at least stray from plaintext in some way.

I think there are a lot of unexplored ways of using AI to create an intelligent overview of a repo and its data structures, or a React project and its components and state, etc.

[ayewo]

> I think there are a lot of unexplored ways of using AI to create an intelligent overview of a repo and its data structures, or a React project and its components and state, etc.

Sounds exactly like what DeepWiki is doing from the Devin AI Agent guys: https://deepwiki.com

[abnercoimbre]

Terminals aren't too far away from evolving [0] beyond UTF-8 characters. Therefore I suspect IDEs and CLIs will continue their turf wars as always.

> hard to imagine that we won't have digests and overviews

100% agreed here.

Disclosure: I'm the author of the project below.

[0] https://terminal.click

[1dom]

FYI, this is currently a dead link - wasn't sure if typo, so googled and confirmed, looks like you're down at the moment. Hopefully not a painful fix on a Sunday.

[conartist6]

You have lost all connection to reality.

Hey by the way I hear all communication between people is going to shift to pictograms soon. You know -- emoji and hieroglyphs. Text just isn't ideal, you know

[km144]

Every system can be translated can be translated to text though. If there is one thing LLMs have essentially always been good at, it is processing written language.

[opdahl]

> Claude Code (neither IDE nor extension) is rapidly gaining ground

What makes you say that? From what I’m observing it doesn’t seem to be talked much about at all.

[jjani]

Spending too much time on HN and other spaces (including offline) where people talk about what they're doing. Making LLM-based things has also been my job since pretty much the original release of GPT3.5 which kicked off the whole industry, so I have an excuse.

The big giveaway is that everyone who has tried it agrees that it's clearly the best agentic coding tool out there. The very few who change back to whatever they were using before (whether IDE fork, extension or terminal agent), do so because of the costs.

Relevant post on the front page right now: A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code [0]. The comment section supports the above as well.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43931409

[opdahl]

I personally tried it and I felt it way more confusing to use compared to using Cursor with Claude 3.7 Sonnet. The CLI interface seems to me more to lend itself for «vibe coding» where you actually never work and look with the actual code. That is why I think Cursor and IDEs are more popular than CLI only tools.

[olalonde]

Claude Code's announcement earned 2k+ point on HN when it launched (7th most popular HN submission this year).

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=claude+code

[opdahl]

Together with 3.7 Sonnet. And the claim was that it is rapidly gaining ground, not that it sparked initial interest. I still don’t see much proof of adoption. This is actually the first I’ve heard about anyone actually actively using it since its launch.

[linsomniac]

>This is actually the first I’ve heard about anyone actually actively using it

I've been reaching for Claude Code first for the last couple weeks. They had offered me a $40 credit after I tried it and didn't really use it, maybe 6 weeks ago, but since I've been using it a lot. I've spent that credit and another $30, and it's REALLY good. One thing I like about Claude Code is you can "/init" and it will create a "CLAUDE.md" that saves off it's understanding of the code, and then you can modify it to give it some working knowledge.

I've also tried Codex with OpenAI and o4-mini, and it works very well too, though I have had it crash on me which claude has not.

I did try Codex with Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview, but it is really weird. It seems to not be able to do any editing, it'll say "You need to make these edits to this file (and describe high level fixes) and then come back when you're done and I'll tell you the edits to do to this other file." So that integration doesn't seem to be complete. I had high hopes because of the reviews of the new 2.5 Pro.

I also tried some claude-like use in the AI panel in Zed yesterday, and made a lot of good progress, it seemed to work pretty well, but then at some point it zeroed out a couple files. I think I might have reached a token limit, it was saying "110K out of 200K" but then something else said "120K" and I wonder if that confused it. With Codex you can compact the history, I didn't see that in Zed. Then at some point my Zed switched from editing to needing me to accept every change. I used nearly the entire trial Zed allowance yesterday asking it to impelement a Galaga-inspired game, with varying success.

[fuzzythinker]

I don't know Claude Code, so if it's "neither IDE nor extension", what is it?

[girvo]

It's a CLI tool