Comment by ojosilva | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ojosilva | Hacker News Reader

Claude Code has been an awesome experience for me too... without ever subscribing to an Anthropic account!

I've never liked the free-tier Claude (Sonnet/Opus) chat sessions I've attempted with code snippets. Claude non-coding chat sessions were good, but I didn't detect anything magical about the model and the code it churned out for me to decide for a Claude Max Plan. Neither Cursor (I'm also a customer), with its partial use of Claude seemed that great. Maybe the magic is mostly in CC the agent...

So, I've been using a modified CC [1] with a modified claude-code-router [2] (on my own server), which exposes an Anthropic endpoint, and a Cerebras Coder account with qwen-3-coder-480b. No doubt Claude models+CC are well greased-out, but I think the folks in the Qwen team trained (distilled?) a coding model that is Sonnet-inspired so maybe that's the reason. I don't know. But the sheer 5x-10x inference speed of Cerebras makes up for any loss in quality from Sonnet or the FP8 quantization of qwen on the Cerebras side. If starting from zero every few agentic steps is the strategy to use, that with Cerebras is just incredible because it's ~ instantaneous.

I've tried my Cerebras Coder account with way too many coding agents, and for now CC, Cline (VS Code) and Qwen Code (a Gemini Code fork) are the ones that work best. CC beats the pack as it compresses the context just right and recovers well from Cerebras 429 errors (tpm limit), due to the speed (hitting ~1500 tps typically) clashing with Cerebras unreasonably tight request limits. When a 429 comes trough, CC just holds its breath a few seconds then goes at it again. Great experience overall!

[1] I've decompiled CC and modified some constants for Cerebras to fix some hickups

[2] had to remove some invalid request json keys sent by CC using CCR, and added others that were missing

This is super impressive to me!

> for now CC, Cline (VS Code) and Qwen Code (a Gemini Code fork) are the ones that work best

Thanks for sharing how you set this up, as well as which agents you've found work best.

I tried a handful before settling on CC (for now!) but there are so many new ones popping up and existing ones seem to be rapidly changing. I also had a good experience with Cline in VS Code, but not quite as good as CC.

Haven't tried Quen Code yet (I tried the Gemini CLI but had issues with the usability; the content would frequently strobe while processing which was a headache to look at).

Sure!

Yeah, definitely it's a coding agent zoo out there. But you can actually notice the polish in CC. Codex looks promising, a more naked look, I hope they invest in it, it's OSS and built in Rust, nice.

Qwen has that same jumpy scrolling as Gemini, and too many boxes, but it works well with Cerebras.

Coding agent product managers out there: stop putting boxes around text! There's no need! In Gemini, the boxes are all of different sizes, it's really ugly to look at. Think about copy-paste, multiline are all messed up with vertical box lines. Argh! Codex, which only has delicate colored border to the left, has a ctrl-t shortcut that is mandatory in TUIs: transcript mode, a ready to copy-paste print out totally togglable.

Another area of improvement is how fast and usable tooling can be. File read/write and patching can really make a difference. Also using the model for different stages of tool calling in parallel, specially if they all get faster like Cerebras. And better compression algos!

Completely agree with all these areas for improvements! I feel like the less UI/UX frills and the easier it is to just see the relevant information whether it's my prompt, the agent's "thinking" or todos, or relevant code changes or commands, the better.

The speed and usability points you make are so critical. I'm sure these will continue to improve - and hope they do so soon!

If you like CC - I'll just leave this here - https://github.com/sst/opencode

Opencode, been there, it has a Cerebras/qwen-coder out of the box preset! Unfortunately I found the TUI somewhat clunky, I dislike text windows and the terminal scrolling was not available, it was enclosed into the current viewport. One of the features of working in a CLI is that it's scrollable - maybe there's a setting for that?

Also it had some cutoffs with Cerebras - every once in a while it will get a reply then nothing happens, just stops there. I think 4xx errors weren't handled well either. Same happens with Codex with a Cerebras provider. Unfortunately there isn't a compelling reason for me to debug that, although I like that Codex is now Rust and OSS, much more fun than decompiling Claude for sure.

That said, I liked that it has sessions, undo and Plan x Code modes ("build" I think it was called), although that's already a non-pattern for most coding agents, it allows me to have say a OpenAI API o3 or gpt-5 to do some paid planning. But even that is not needed with something like Cerebras that just shoots code out of its butt like there's no tomorrow. Just rinse and repeat until it gets it right.

EDIT: just recalled another thing about opencode that messed me up: no exiting on ctrl-d blows up my mental unix cognition.

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