[fjalahdbtnt]

What the hell is the point of a desktop app for a chatbot? I thought there were apis for this sort of thing.

If you need to run code locally, why bother paying google to run claude?

> I highly recommend using it with Claude Desktop to start. It's prettier and there are no api charges!

???? How does this make sense to anyone

[didibus]

I'm not sure what you are asking exactly?

Say you have a Clojure project, it's in a folder on your computer where you likely cloned or initialized a git repo.

Now you want to leverage an agentic LLM that can connect to clojure-mcp so you can prompt the LLM to make real edits to your project source files, folder structure, resources, documentation, etc.

Your options are kind of limited: - Amazon Q CLI - Claude Code CLI - OpenAI Codex CLI

Those are the best. Then you have the IDE based ones, like Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot agent mode (in public preview currently), and so on.

What they are saying though is that Claude Desktop also support MCP, and can be used without incurring API charges.

Honestly, the in-IDE ones, for me, are not very good, you really don't need this stuff tied up inside an editor. I prefer the CLIs personally, but can see how you can also just as easily run Claude Desktop as a side-bar than need something inside your editor.

[roenxi]

And present state isn't even that important. In 2-4 years we'll be 2 hardware generations in the future, people can buy hardware tailored to 2024-25 models and VRAM will be creeping up (or mitigations for low VRAM found). The models something uses today don't tell us much about what a project will look like in 3 years. None of the current crop of leading models are going to last that long. A project might easily be looking at the medium term not the present.

[dotemacs]

> Your options are kind of limited: - Amazon Q CLI - Claude Code CLI - OpenAI Codex CLI

Ampcode have a CLI, which is their agent using Claude 4.

Google also came out with Jules a few days ago.

There's aider, with which you can use whichever LLM you'd like.

I'm pretty sure that there are others...

[didibus]

Aider does not have MCP support yet. Neither does Jules I believe.

Ampcode I heard of, but I also heard it's very expensive, same for Devin. I also don't know if either of them support MCP.

I'm sure there are others, of varying quality, but realistically, the options you'd want to use are the ones I listed I think.

P.S.: I'd been looking for alternatives by the way, something that lets me use OpenAI models, I've yet to try it but heard good things about: https://block.github.io/goose/

[throwaway314155]

> Your options are kind of limited: - Amazon Q CLI - Claude Code CLI - OpenAI Codex CLI

Out of curiosity, which option do you go for?

[didibus]

For clojure-mcp, you really should try just Claude Desktop. That's because clojure-mcp provides all the tools you need already, reading files, running shell commands, running code in the REPL, running tests, listing directories, linting code, etc.

The others I listed above come with a lot of tools baked in, and I'm not sure if they could interfere, like the LLM might prefer one that's bundled to using the clojure-mcp ones.

Otherwise I use Amazon Q CLI, because it is the cheapest of the bunch. I'd say Claude Code CLI is the other I'd use personally.