...uh, I think Claude Code is great, actually. A lot of that is indeed just the strength of the underlying model, but the local client is great too. Plan mode, checkpoints, subagents... I've been using Claude Code for a year now, and I feel like Anthropic has steadily been eliminating pain points.
It's certainly a lot better than the Gemini cli!
Functionality-wise, it's great, but it's a buggy mess, and it seems to be getting worse with each release.