Thanks for letting us know about the binary size! We previously enabled debug info in release builds to use flamegraphs, but actually don't need it for most builds. I just disabled it (https://github.com/candy-lang/candy/pull/950), and the binary size went down from 177.4 MB to 14.2 MB for me!
The CLI should work, or at least we're using it regularly when working on Candy. Can you please share your OS and the command and output, maybe in a GitHub issue? We definitely need to improve our documentation and the CLI's error handling. Does running `cargo run --release -- run ./packages/Examples/helloWorld.candy` from the repository root work for you?
The VS Code extension also uses the CLI internally since that exposes a language server, so it basically runs `cargo run --release -- lsp`. But we also have to improve the stability here.