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Comment by retinaros | Hacker News Reader

too expensive. I cant understand why everyone is into claude code vs using claude in cursor or windsurf.

I think it depends a lot on how you value your time. I'm personally willing to spend hundreds or thousands per month happily if it saves me enough hours. I'd estimate that if I were to do consulting, I'd likely be charging in the $150-250 per hour range, so by my math, it's pretty easy to justify any tools that save me even a few hours per month.

Or, increasingly, how the company values your time. If Claude Code can make a $100K/year dev 10% more productive, it's worth it to the employer to pay anything under $1600/month for it (assuming fully loaded cost of the employee to the business is twice salary).

Productivity and business value are not linearly related. It could provide 0 business value to make someone 10% more productive.

I was thinking of productivity as generation of business value rather than something less correlated like lines of code produced. But sure, it's probably more accurate to directly say "business value".

ok but in what way a terminal is a bettter UI than an IDE? I am trying all of them on a weekly basis and windsurf UX seems miles ahead/ more efficient than a terminal. that is also what OAI believes or else they wouldnt try to buy it

I like the terminal UX because VS Code (and any forks of it) is not my editor of choice, and swapping around to use an editor just for AI coding is annoying (I was doing that with the Zed Assistant a lot).

With Claude Code I can stay in Goland, and have Claude Code in the terminal.

You could also try JetBrains' Junie and Sourcegraph Cody.

windsurf also have plugins to jetbrains - they rebranded the whole company from codeium to windsurf and their jetbrains plugin also support cascade.

I was very unimpressed with their original AI assistance implementation, so I’m gonna wait to see some user stories / reviews before I put my time into that, and so far I have seen effectively no mention of Junie anywhere.

Moreover, there’s no way to bring your own key, with the highest subscription tier being $20 per month flat it seems, which is the cost of just 1-3 sessions with Claude Code. Thus, without evidence to the contrary, I’m not holding my breath for now.

One thing that is clearly better in the terminal is secrets management/environment variables.

It's also much easier to control execution in a structured and reliable way in the terminal. Here's an automated debugging use case, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-_76U_nK0Y

After I have a session going on, the Claude Code terminal app has been given the permission to do everything I want it to. Then I just let it burn itself out doing whatever. It's a background task. That's the big advantage. I don't baby sit it.

Not a better UI at all but seems like they're able to then focus on what matters in these early stages and that's quality of output.

Are you still working 40 hours a week? If so, what's the difference?

I don’t - if I can use a tool that saves me 10 hours a week, that’s 10 hours more beach time for me.

Accomplishing more in that 40 hours?

And being paid more? Most salaried employees would not be.

You get the same results for cheaper by using a different tool (Windsurf's better imho).

That may be, but I think tools with a fixed monthly fee are always going to have an incentive to reduce their own costs on the backend and route you toward less capable models, cut down context size, produce less output, stop before the task is truly finished, etc.

Given how much time these models can save me, I'd rather optimize for capability and just accept whatever the price is as a cost of doing business. (Within reason I guess—I probably wouldn't go beyond $2-3k per month at this point, unless there was very clear ROI on that spend.)

Also, it's not only about saving time. More powerful AI tools allow me to build things it would otherwise be impossible to build... that's just as important as the time/cost equation.

It's literally the same model. I can build more complex stuff in windsurf as the IDE is better than Cline/Roocode integration in vscode. It's still the same model under the hood. Sonnet 202500219

I mean, you pour money down the drain if you think it's helping, have at it :P

It's the same model but not necessarily the same context. Like he said, those tools try to be very 'smart' with context to save costs.

You're not actually getting all the files you add in the context window, you're getting a RAG'd version of it, which is generally much worse if the un-RAG'd code is still within the effective context limit.

I've spent more than 40 hours/week and close to $1,000 in API credits using these tools. For me the ranking goes. But, we all will have difference experiences.

1. Claude Code 2. Cursor 3. Cline. 4. Windsurf

How you can place windsuf in number 4 is interesting, especially given it's very similar to cursor but is leaner on the UI and Cline is a vs-code plugin that very verbose.

I'll stick with Windsurf, especially given their upcoming announcement.

I care a lot less about UI and more about quality of output. Windsurf has had some of the lowest quality outputs for me.

$1000 over how many 40 hour weeks?

Honesty not sure quite a few. 6-8 or so?

How do you price this in? If you’re charging by the hour, paying out of pocket to reduce your hours seems self-defeating unless you raise your rates enough to cover both the costs and the lost hours. I can’t imagine too many clients would accept “I’m very expensive per hour because I’m fast, because I get AI to do most of it.”

As the OP said, he can now tackle more complex tasks:

> More powerful AI tools allow me to build things it would otherwise be impossible to build...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43709775

> if it saves me enough hours

You're being paid to type? I want your job.

Claude Code has been able to produce results equivalent to a junior engineer. I spent about $300 API credits in a month but got the value out of it far surpassing that.

If you have AWS credits...

export CLAUDE_CODE_USE_BEDROCK=1

export ANTHROPIC_MODEL=us.anthropic.claude-3-7-sonnet-20250219-v1:0

export ANTHROPIC_API_TYPE=bedrock

Is this for Claude Code?

Yep

and where are these export used? Ader?

Anecdotally, Claude code performs much better than Claude within Cursor. Not sure if it’s a system prompt thing or if I’ve just convinced myself of it because the aesthetic is so much better, but either way the end result feels better to me.

One has the incentive to burn through as much tokens and the other has an incentive to use as little as possible

Great point.

My choice conspiracy is resource allocation and playing favorites.

I tried switching from Claude Code to both Cursor and Windsurf. Neither of the latter IDEs fully support MCP implementations (missing basic things like tool definitions and other vital features last time I tried) and both have been riddled with their own agentic flow issues (cursor going down for a week a bit ago, windsurf requiring paid upgrades to "get around" bugs, etc).

This is all ignoring the controversies that pop up around e.g. Cursor seemingly every week. As an IDE, they're both getting there -- but I have objectively better results in Claude Code.

that's what my Ramp card is for.

seriously though, anything that makes me smarter and more productive has a threshold in the thousands-of-dollars range, not hundreds

Why is using cursor with sonnet cheaper than using claude code?

probably because cursor is betting on many paying people not using their tool to full extend. Like people paying on their gym memberships but not going to the gym.

Or they are burning VC money.

I've read anecdotal evidence that it uses tokens more sparingly than Claude Code - supported by the, likewise anecdotal, evidence that Claude Code is more effective in practice. However, that would be reasonable, as basically 1-3 sessions with Claude Code cost what a whole month of Cursor costs.

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