(2) isn't my experience at all. It's not 100% bug free but it definitely seems more stable (and faster) than I when I first used it last year.
Claude Code is fairly simple. But Claude Desktop is a freaking mess, it loses chats when I switch tabs, it has no easy way to auto-extend the context, and it's just slow.
The UI flickers rapidly in some cases when I use it in the VSCode terminal. When I first saw this when using Claude Code I imagined it was some vibe code bug that would be worked out quickly. But it's been like 9 months and still every day it has this behavior - to the point that it crashes VSCode! I can only imagine that no one at Anthropic uses VSCode because it really seems insane it's gone this long unfixed.