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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

I write very little code these days, so I've been following the AI development mostly from the backseat. One aspect I fail to grasp perfectly is what the practical differences are between CLI (so terminal-based) agents and ones fully integrated into an IDE.

Could someone chime in and give their opinion on what are the pros and cons of either approach?

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I guess you’re probably looking for someone who uses cursor etc to answer but here’s a data point from someone a bit off the beaten path.

My editor supports both modes (emacs). I have the editor integration features (diff support etc) turned off and just use emacs to manage 5+ shells that each have a CLI agent (one of Claude, opencode, amp free) running in them.

If I want to go deep into a prompt then I’ll write a markdown file and iterate on it with a CLI.

I noticed that OpenCode requires per their own website "a modern terminal emulator" - so, no problem in Emacs? Are you running M-x term?

I have my own function that starts up a vterm in the root of the repo that I’m in. It is average for running Claude (long sessions get the scrolling through the whole history on every output character bug) but actually better at running opencode which doesn’t have this problem.

I don't have opencode installed, but I'm curious: if you start a terminal within Emacs with M-x term, how well does it do at running the opencode CLI?

I don't think there is a meaningful difference.

Whether I use Antigravity, VS Code with Claude Code CLI, GitHub Copilot IDE plugins, or the Codex app, they all do similar things.

Although I'd say Codex and Claude Code often feel significantly better to me, currently. In terms of what they can achieve and how I work with them.

For me, I use an IDE if I plan to look at the code.

So, to you basically the distinction is "fully vibe-coded" vs. "with human in the loop"?

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