After spending $450 in January for the nightmare, I switched to $200 month subscription using the Claude Code plugin which I assume is a wrapper around the Claude Code cli -- 1000% better.
The trillion dollar company seriously needs to start dumping upper and mid management! You can quote me on that.
I use Opus 4.6 (for complex refactoring), Gemini 3.1 Pro (for html/css/web stuff) and GPT Codex 5.3 (workhorse, replaced Sonnet for me because on Copilot it has larger context) mostly on it.
For small tools. But also for large projects.
Current projects are:
1) .NET C#, Angular, Oracle database. Around 300k LoC.
2) Full stack TypeScript with Hono on backend, React on frontend glued by trpc, kysely and PostgreSQL. Around 120k LoC.
Works well in both. I'm using plan mode and agent mode.
What helps a ton are e2e playright tests which are executed by the agent after each code change.
My only complain is that it tends to get stutters after many sessions/hours. A restart fixes it.
$39/mo plan.
https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-claude-code-founde...
The answer of course is that it can’t do it and maintain compatibility between all three well enough as it’s high effort and each has its own idiosyncrasies.
In python it was very nearly a 1-shot, there was an issue with one watermark not showing up on one API endpoint that I had to give it a couple kicks at the can to fix. Go it was able to get but it needed 5+ attempts at rework. Rust took ~10+, and Zig took maybe 15+.
They were all given the same prompt, though they all likely would have dont much better if I had it build a test suite or at least a manual testing recipe for it to follow.
That is why everyone jumped to building in Electron because it is based on web standards that are free and are running on chromium which kind of is tied to Google but you are not tied to Google and don’t have to pay them a fee. You can also easily provide kind of the same experience on mobile skipping Android shenigans.
At most, VS Code might say that it has disabled lexing, syntax coloring, etc. due to the file size. But I don't care about that for log files...
OK, maybe Visual Studio Code uses more memory for the same file than Sublime Text would. But I think it's rather more important that the editor runs at all.
Most users are forced to use the software that they use. That doesn't mean they don't care, just that they're stuck.
BTW, this going to matter MORE now that RAM prices are skyrocketing..
We should refuse to accept coding agents until they have fully replaced chromium. By that point, the world will see that our reticence was wisdom.
A few years ago maybe. Tauri makes better sense for this use case today - like Electron but with system webviews, so at least doesn't bloat your system with extra copies of Chrome. And strongly encourages Rust for the application core over JS/Node.
The fact that claude code is a still buggy mess is a testament to the quality of the dream they're trying to sell.
What bugs are you seeing? I use Claude Code a lot on an Ubuntu 22.04 system and I've had very few issues with it. I'm not sure really how to quantify the amount of use; maybe "ccusage" is a good metric? That says over the last month I've used $964, and I've got 6-8 months of use on it, though only the last ~3-5 at that level. And I've got fairly wide use as well: MCP, skills, agents, agent teams...
I can see it in my team. We've all been using Claude a lot for the last 6 months. It's hard to measure the impact, but I can tell our systems are as buggy as ever. AI isn't a silver bullet.
I've been building a native macOS AI client in Swift — it's 15MB, provider-agnostic, and open source: https://github.com/dinoki-ai/osaurus
Committing to one platform well beats a mediocre Electron wrapper on all three.
It's a nodejs app, and there is no reason to have a problem with that. Nodejs can wait for inference as fast as any native app can.
Node apps typically have serious software supply chain problems. Their dependency trees are typically unauditable in practice.
Also I refuse to download and run Node.js programs due to the security risk. Unfortunately that keeps me away from opencode as well, but thankfully Codex and Vibe are not Node.js, and neither is Zed or Jetbrains products.
It's pretty easy to argue your point if you pick a strawman as your opponent.
They have said that you can be significantly more productive (which seems to be the case for many) and that most of their company primarily uses LLM to write code and no longer write it by hand. They also seems to be doing well w.r.t. competition.
There are legitimate complaints to be made against LLMs, pick one of them - but don't make up things to argue against.
And despite what Anthropic and OpenAI want you to think, these LLMs are not AGI. They cannot invent something new. They are only as good as the training data.
Also AI is better at beaten path coding. Spend more tokens on native or spend them on marketing?
Claude is going to help mostly with code, much less with design. It might help to accelerate integration, if the application is simple enough and the environment is good enough. The fact is, going cross-platform native trebles effort in areas that Claude does not yet have a useful impact.
mihaela•40m ago