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Comment by Syzygies | Hacker News Reader

I just ended my Cursor subscription today, and upgraded from Claude's Pro to Max plan to reduce my Claude Code costs. They now include a healthy Claude Code allowance in the Max plans.

If one has already set up Claude Code with metered API use, one toggles between plans using the /login command. Once to start using Max, then whenever one hits a five hour rate limit and wants to keep working.

I've tried many platforms. I kept Cursor long after Windsurf, but Claude Code is a clear winner, as most people report who don't bristle at the cost.

When Cursor or Windsurf forks VS Code, they have a reason. Their chat panes always felt like periscopes; one has better control over Claude Code in a terminal, and this frees up one's choice of editor. I now use Sublime Text, fast and lean.

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Signal-boosting this -- I use Claude Code too, and it's beautiful: all the benefits of typing long-form thoughts, ideas, strategy, combined with direct access (for the llm api) to the codebase (no uploading/downloading), and Anthropic's promise of not training on your inputs or outputs.

Claude code is actually great. I get to use any tools/editor I want, and get the AI agent workflow.

Right, it decouples your IDE choice from the "Code Assistant" choice, giving you massive flexibility.

Do you also use aider? How does it compare to Claude code? The concept seems to be similar, a stand-alone cli agent.

I find Aider more targeted, I only used Claude Code once or twice, but it tended to go off on its own mission. Aider just does what you tell it, no more, no less.

claude can be used in a pipeline or as a CI/CD command, which is nice.

The aider TUI kind of sucks, which I think holds it back a little.

I prefer the explicitness of aider (/ask, /add, /architect, etc) but people at my work have been moving to claude so I'm trying to keep up with them.

its a pity that it only works with Claude out of the box. There is a way to proxy it to other models: https://github.com/1rgs/claude-code-proxy I've found it works with Gemini. But would be better if it just allowed switching.

me too. and they are pushing new updates everyday. If you are a emacs/vim user claude code is really pushing what's possible with a terminal app (the loading text, custom command, auto cursor refresh)

Codex with o3 worked much better for my projects than Claude code. Plus it’s open source so I can switch models easily.

How does this compare with using openrouter + OSS? I'm currently averaging $20/month with copious usage (and no limits, obviously).

OSS?

Open source software?

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