alt Hacker NewsI did my own experiment with Claude Code vs Cursor tab completion. The task was to convert an Excel file to a structured format. Nothing fancy at all.
Claude Code took 4 hours, with multiple prompts. At the end, it started to break the previous fixes in favor of new features. The code was spaghetti. There was no way I could fix it myself or steer Claude Code into fixing it the right way. Either it was a dead-end or a dice roll with every prompt.
Then I implemented my own version with Cursor tab completion. It took the same amount of time, 4 hours. The code had a clear object-oriented architecture, with a structure for evolution. Adding a new feature didn't require any prompts at all.
As a result, Claude Code was worse in terms of productivity: the same amount of time, worse quality output, no possibility of (or at best very high cost of) code evolution.
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The exact same prompt ? Everything depends on the prompt and it’s different tools. These days the quality and what’s build around the prompt matters as much as the code. We can’t feed generic query.
Are you able to share your prompts to Claude Code? I assume not, they are probably not saved - but this genuinely surprised me, it seems like exactly the type of task an LLM would excel at (no pun intended!). What model were you using OOI?