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Comment by flawn | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate why Claude Code is that much better in regard to also the missing in built IDE functionality?

It can use any command line tool very well. I just told him "Look up the status of the created systemd servive". It ssh-d to the machine, run "systemctl status", read the output and fixed issues based on that! That was totally unexpected.

I hope this question doesn't sound snarky, it's a legitimate concern that I want to address for myself: how do you ensure that once it ssh's to the machine, it does not execute potentially damaging commands?

Claude code asks you permissions for every command. It also gives you the possibility of marking commands as safe so next time it can use them without asking .

So these agents that people are so excited about spawning in parallel stop and ask you before executing each command they choose to execute? What kind of life is that. I'd rather do something myself than tell 5 AI agents what I want and then keep approving each command they are going to run.

I'm not saying it is better if they run commands without my approval. This whole thing is just doesn't seem as exciting as other people make it out to be. Maybe I am missing something.

It can literally be a single command to ssh into that machine and check if the systemd service is running. If it is in your history, you'd use ctrl+r to lookback anyway. It sounds so much worse asking some AI agent to look up the status of that service we deployed earlier. And then approve its commands on top of that.

Sure, if you already have the knowledge and can do it faster than the AI, you can do it yourself.

But a beginner in system administration can also do it fast.

I do not think that is a good thing in the long run. More people in fields they know absolutely nothing about? That does not sound like a good thing to me. I am going to become a chemical engineer (something I know absolutely nothing about) or some shit and have an LLM with me doing my job for me. Sounds good I guess?

I think it's something you have to try in order to understand.

Running commands one by one and getting permission may sound tedious. But for me, it maps closely to what I do as a developer: check out a repository, read its documentation, look at the code, create a branch, make a set of changes, write a test, test, iterate, check in.

Each of those steps is done with LLM superpowers: the right git commands, rapid review of codebase and documentation, language specific code changes, good test methodology, etc.

And if any of those steps go off the rails, you can provide guidance or revert (if you are careful).

It isn't perfect by any means. CC needs guidance. But it is, for me, so much better than auto-complete style systems that try to guess what I am going to code. Frankly, that really annoys me, especially once you've seen a different model of interaction.

It’s smarter.

And as of the latest release, has VSCode/Cursor/Windsurf integration.

How can it be smarter? Cursor can use Claude 4 as model, so it should be the same?

The system prompt, agent landscape and fundamental behavior is different. Its just like using chatgpt vs openai api. A single chatgpt conversation can go forever because it's not just doing one call for each message you send.

It has a totally different way of dealing with context

I mostly use it to understand and fix my bugs/Rust compilation problems that I can't be bothered to fix. 95% happy with the results so far. For coding I use Claude in chat though, as my thoughts are mostly not clear enough at the start to finish a component to my liking. Fixing bugs is easier, though I had to tell it to "not remove features" sometimes. Feature gone, bug gone. ;)

Claude code now automatically integrates into my ide for diff preview. It's not sugar, but it's very low friction, even from the cli.

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