alt Hacker NewsFor me, Claude Code was the most impressive innovation this year. Cursor was a good proof of concept but Claude Code is the tool that actually got me to use LLMs for coding.
The kind of code that Claude produces looks almost exactly like the code I would write myself. It's like it's reading my mind. This is a game changer because I can maintain the code that Claude produces.
With Claude Code, there are no surprises. I can pretty much guess what its code will look like 90% to 95% of the time but it writes it a lot faster than I could. This is an amazing innovation.
Gemini is quite impressive as well. Nano banana in particular is very useful for graphic design.
I haven't tried Gemini with coding yet but TBH, Claude Code does such a great job; if I could code any faster, I would get decision fatigue. I don't like rushing into architecture or UX decisions. I like to sit on certain decisions for a day or two before starting implementation. Once you start in a particular direction, it's hard to undo and you may try to double down on the mistake due to sunk cost fallacy. I try hard to avoid that.
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Do you guys all work 100% on open source? Or are you uploading bits of your copyrighted code for future training to Anthropic? I hate patents so copyright is the only IP protection I have.
I've used all of these tools and for me Cursor works just as well but has tabs, easy ways to abort or edit prompts, great visual diff, etc...
Someone sell me on how Claude Code, I just don't get it.
Nano Banana Pro is legitimately an insane tool if you know how to use it. I still can’t believe they released it in the wild
I first got into agentic properly with GLM coding plan (it's like $2/month), but I found myself very consistently asking Claude to make the code more elegant and readable. At which point I realized I was being silly and just switched to Claude code.
(GLM etc. get surprisingly close with good prompting but... $0.60/day to not worry about that is a no brainer.)
I don’t have much time to evaluate tools every months and I have settled on Cursor. I’m curious on what I’m missing when using the same models?
I don't even see much reason to use Cursor. I am used to IntelliJ IDEA, so I just downloaded the Claude Code plugin and basically now I use the IDE only for navigating in the code, finding references and reviewing the code. I can't even remember the last time I wrote more than 2 lines of code. Claude Code has catapulted my performance at least 5x if not more. And now that the cost of writing test is so minimal I am also able to achieve much better (and meaningful!) test coverage too. The AI agents is where the most productivity is. I just create a plan with Claude, iterate over, ask questions, then let it implement the plan, review, ask to do some adjustments. No manual writing of code at all. Zero.