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Comment by redox99 | Hacker News Reader

I also work with C++, and I use Codex (desktop) which writes 99.99% of my code, plus Visual Studio, which is nice for reading and navigating code. For webdev I do VSCode + Codex.

I started with Cursor back in the day, but switched to Claude Code and then Codex when Cursor got too expensive.

If price wasn't an issue, maybe I'd prefer Cursor only because I can easily switch between models. But that's it. I always disliked the "accept/reject" workflow in cursor, but that's probably optional nowadays I guess?

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I love the accept reject flow because I still constantly have to stop AI models from writing awful architecture or reimplementing code we already wrote elsewhere

Yeah, I have found the same. A lot of times it does get things right, but if it deviates man it can just drift hard.

For example, sometimes Claude just obsessively reads files and goes on massive tangents. Then when I stop it and ask, "why are you doing that?", it kindly apologizes and admits it shouldn't have gone on a tangent.

The token burn if I don't stop it would be quite high.

Granted, this might be because I'm not giving it optimal prompt/negative-prompt instructions though.

I just check the git diff after claude code writes stuff. Stage things before letting it run wild so I can undo whatevs.

That's expensive though. The sooner you stop it from acting out the less you spend on a rabbit trail.

How is it different from Keep / Discard in other tools? I've been slowly converting my git repositories to jj locally because that gives me more granular fallback and mix and match options.

Well I tried CLaude Code for the first time in a while (I am building my own coding app www.propelcode.app so I can code on my phone when I take my kids to classes and such) and it literally ignored my question and suggestion and just kept coding away.

I hate the accept reject flow, because I want a conventional code review workflow where I can write comments on specific lines of code and maybe edit the code myself.

If I reject, then the AI will struggle to modify just the parts I disagree with, if I accept, the AI will tend towards adding code rather than updating the bad code.

At that point copy paste without agentic coding tends to work much better.

Fable makes any IDE AI integration almost entirely unnecessary. Claude one shots pretty much everything, and fixing any small errors is easier when just talking to Claude again.

Anthropic is going to offer better pricing using their agentic harness. Why pay more for less?

An IDE at this point is best as a tool for code review. They need to start building better code review tools.

Some of us are working on things that Claude can't one shot. Like, not even close.

Also https://xcancel.com/mitchellh/status/2066657032938442833#m

I really don't see IDE's going out of fashion anytime soon.

I can't quite understand the "fixing small errors is easier when just talking to Claude" flow.

I tried having it write some tests today. It got very close to what I want, but picked a stupid set of input values (two fields that look independent that should only be used with related values). I thought about "how do I explain this" and then just went in and fixed it myself.

How is it easier to write "Okay, go back to testBlah and change xxx to yyy" versus clicking on XXX in the IDE and typing YYY by hand? Maybe if you had 500 faulty tests and were forbidden from using search-and-replace for some reason.

It makes sense when code generation is the limiting factor, but I end up with a lot of changes where the actual code delta is smaller than the necessary prompt to convince the bot to produce it.

Try the superpowers plugin, let it write a spec (what do you want?) and a plan (how is it implemented). Then let it implement the plan.

Review each step as much as you care. These things take time so you can just do other stuff while it’s cooking.

With proper isolation of projects you can easily have multiple sessions in parallel. I frequently have 4 to 8 parallel Claude Code sessions, each with whole trees of agents reproducing, speccing, planning, implementing and reviewing things.

For common mistakes, you can make it remember things or rely on reviews.

> Claude one shots pretty much everything

What?

> An IDE at this point is best as a tool for code review.

I heard from a friend that most devs building serious stuff still write code. It's shocking but true. (No code review needed.)

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