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
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.
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.
it completely blew my mind. i wrote maybe 10 lines of code manually. 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.
Exaggerations like this really don't help your credibility
Brings a crazy new meaning to "fail fast" though
You should never have to copy/paste something from Claude Code...?
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!
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.
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.