[WXLCKNO]

I've been trying every flavor of AI powered development and after trying Claude Code for two days with an API key, I upgraded to the full Max 20x plan.

Cursor, Windsurf, Roo Code / Cline, they're fine but nothing feels as thorough and useful to me as Claude Code.

The Codex CLI from OpenAI is not bad either, there's just something satisfying about the LLM straight up using the CLI

[solumunus]

It really is night and day. Most of them feel like cool toys, Claude Code is a genuine work horse. It immediately became completely integral to my workflow. I own a small business and I can say with absolute confidence this will reduce the amount of devs I need to hire going forward.

[hollowturtle]

I don't get claims like that, if AI let me do more and be more productive with less people I could also grow and scale more, that means that I can also hire more and again multiply growth because each dev will bring more and more... I'm skeptic because I don't see it happening, actually the contrary more people doing more things maybe, but the not 10x nor 100x otherwise we would see products built in 5 years coming out in literally 15 days

[davnicwil]

It might be that the value more software can add is already at its limit in any given business - or at least returns will be diminishing. Meaning in those particular businesses the appetite to hire devs might stay flat (or even shrink!) as AI makes existing devs more efficient.

The more interesting question is whether this is true across the economy as a whole. In my view the answer is clearly no. Are we already operating at the limit of more software to add value at the margin? No.

So though any particular existing business might stop hiring or even cut staff, it won't matter if more businesses are created to do yet more things in the world with software. We might even end up in a place where across the economy, more dev jobs exist as a result of more people doing more with software in a kind of snowball effect.

More conservatively, though, you'd at least expect us to just reach equilibrium with current jobs if indeed there is new demand for software to soak up.

[solumunus]

It’s not my goal to scale infinitely. I want to run a small, tight business which is highly profitable but also pleasant to operate long term. I’m not looking for some huge exit.

[wellthisisgreat]

hey can you explain the appeal of Claude Code vs Cursor?

I know the context window part and Cursor RAG-ing it, but isn't IDE integration a a true force multiplier?

Or does Claude Code do something similar with "send to chat" / smart (Cursor's TAB feature) autocomplete etc.?

I fired it up but it seemed like just Claude in terminal with a lot more manual copy-pasting expected?

I tried all the usual suspects in AI-assisted programming, and Cursor's TAB is too good to give up vs Roo / Cline.

I do agree Claude's the best for programming so would love to use it full-featured version.

[JoeMattie]

I would also like to know this. I've only very briefly looked into Claude code and I may just not understand how I'm supposed to be using it.

I currently use cursor with Claude 4 Sonnet (thinking) in agent mode and it is absolutely crushing it.

Last night i had it refactor some Django / react / vite / Postgres code for me to speed up data loading over websocket and it managed to:

- add binary websocket support via a custom hook - added missing indexes to the model - clean up the data structure of the payload - add messagepack and gzip compression - document everything it did - add caching - write tests - write and use scripts while doing the optimizations to verify that the approaches it was attempting actually sped up the transfer

All entirely unattended. I just walked away for 10 minutes and had a sandwich.

The best part is that the code it wrote is concise, clean, and even stylistically similar to the existing codebase.

If claude code can improve on that I would love to know what I am missing!

[WXLCKNO]

My best comparison is that it's like MacBooks/iPhones etc.

Apple builds both the hardware and the software so it feels harmonious and well optimized.

Anthropic build the model and the tool and it just works, although sonnet 4 in cursor is good too but if you've got the 20$ plan often you're crippled on context size (not sure if that's true with sonnet 4 specifically).

I had actually heard about the OpenAI Codex CLI before Claude Code and had the same thought initially, not understanding the appeal.

Give it a shot and maybe you'll change your mind, I just tried because of the hype and the hype was right for once.

[steveklabnik]

If you use VS: Code, install the plugin, and run Claude code from the terminal, you get the same experience as Cursor.

[cybrjoe]

i rewrote a code base that i’ve been tinkering on for the last 2 years or so this weekend. a complete replatform, new tech stack, ui, infra, the whole nine yards. the rewrite took exactly 3 days, referenced the old code base, online documentation, github issues all without (mostly) ever leaving claude.

it completely blew my mind. i wrote maybe 10 lines of code manually. it’s going to eliminate jobs.

[lazystar]

> it’s going to eliminate jobs.

that's the part i'm not sold on yet. it's a tool that allows you to do a year's work in a week - but every dev in every company will be able to use that tool, thus it will increase the productivity of each engineer by an equal amount. that means each company's products will get much better much faster - and it means that any company that cuts head count will be at risk of falling behind it's competitors.

i could see it getting rid of some of the infosec analysts, i guess. since itll be easier to keep a codebase up to date, the folks that run a nessus scan and cut tickets asking teams to upgrade their codebase will have less work available.

[bluefirebrand]

> it's a tool that allows you to do a year's work in a week

Exaggerations like this really don't help your credibility

[owebmaster]

How many teams of 10 took a year and USD 5 millions to develop a CRUD that failed? That can be done in one week now

[bluefirebrand]

I'm not sure that spending $5 Million to fail every week is actually better than spending $5 million to fail once a year

Brings a crazy new meaning to "fail fast" though

[lazystar]

the amount isn't relevant to the argument; the point is that the amount - whatever that may be - is applied equally to all companies, which means the competitive balance will stay the same. its a great build tool, but you still need builders to use the tool.

[sorcerer-mar]

> I fired it up but it seemed like just Claude in terminal with a lot more manual copy-pasting expected?

You should never have to copy/paste something from Claude Code...?

[WXLCKNO]

Claude Code has a VS Code (and therefore cursor / windsurf) extension so it will show you changes it wants to make directly in the IDE.

I still use the Cursor auto complete but the rest is all Claude Code.

Even without the extension Claude is directly modifying and creating files so you never have to copy paste.

[dandaka]

Claude Code works surprisingly well and is also cheaper, compared to Windsurf and Cline + Sonnet 4. The rate of errors dropped dramatically for my side projects, from "I have to check most changes" to "I have not written a line".