My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

Reading all these glowing reviews of Claude Code, I still get the feeling that either everyone’s been paid off or it’s just the die-hard fans of terminal windows and editors like Emacs and Vim. Using the terminal is right up their alley—it’s in their DNA.

Every time I read comments saying Claude Code is far better than Cursor, I fire it up, pay for a subscription, and run it on a large, complex TypeScript codebase. First, the whole process takes a hell of a lot of time. Second, the learning curve is steep: you have to work through the terminal and type commands.

And the outcome is exactly the same as with the Claude that’s built into Cursor—only slower, less clear, and the generated code is harder to review afterward. I don’t know… At this point my only impression is that all those influencers in the comments are either sponsored, or they’ve already shelled out their $200 and are now defending their choice. Or they simply haven’t used Cursor enough to figure out how to get the most out of it.

I still can’t see any real advantage to Claude Code, other than supposedly higher limits. I don’t get it. I’ve already paid for Claude Code, and I’m also paying for Cursor Pro, which is another $200, but I’m more productive with Cursor so far.

I’ve been programming for 18 years, write a ton of code every single day, and I can say Cursor gives me more. I switch between Gemini 2.5 Pro—when I need to handle tasks with a big, long context—and Claude 4.0 for routine stuff.

So no one has convinced me yet, and I haven’t seen any other benefit. Maybe later… I don’t know.

I find it telling that I have (mostly) good experiences with the GPT family and (mostly) bad experiences with the Claude family.

I just wish I could figure out what it tells. Their training data can't be that different. The problems I'm feeding them are the same. Many people think Claude is the more capable of the two.

It has to be how I'm presenting the problems, right? What other variable is there?

Re: the "white page problem", that is just known as motivation inertia. You can overcome it by training yourself to agree with yourself to "just do it" for 5 minutes, even if you really, really don't want to. If you're still demotivated after that, fine. But 9 out of 10 times, once you've started, it's surprisingly easy to keep the momentum up. This is also great for going to the gym or cleaning up your home, where an LLM can't come to the rescue :)

Re: usage of LLMs, that is honestly the way I like to use LLMs. That and auto-complete.

It's great for creating a bird's-eye view of a project because that is very fuzzy and no granular details are needed yet. And it's great at being fancy autocomplete, with its stochastic bones. But the middle part where all the complexity and edge cases are is where LLMs still fail a lot. I shudder for the teams that have to PR review devs that jubilantly declare they have "5x'ed" their output with LLMs, senior or not.

What is even more worrisome is that the brain is a muscle. We have to exercise it with thinking, hence why puzzlers stay sharp at old age. The more you outsource your code (or creative writing) thinking, the worse you get at it, and the more your brain atrophies. You're already seeing it with Claude Code, where devs panic when they hit the limit because they just might have to code unassisted.

Some of it is taste. Personally, I dislike VSCode and its descendants; it feels bloated and like I’m always being advertised to inside the product. I want my editor to disappear from thought, and Sublime does this for me.

In that context, CC is amazing.

From what I see, you have to get your claude.md instructions right, and most of it is using planning mode. The CLI is exactly how you interact with it. It's less vibe code and what I'd call supervisory code.

It's less about writing code, more about building an engine that codes. It's hands off but unlike Cursor, it's not as eyes-off. You do observe and interrupt it. It is great for full on TDF - it figures out the feature, writes the test for the feature, fails the test, rewrites the code to pass. But at some point, you realize you got the instructions wrong and because you're outside the loop, you have to interrupt it.

I think it's a natural progression, but it's not for everyone. The people who hated not being able to write functions will hate claude code even more. But some people love writing their engines.