So... I know that people frame these sorts of things as if it's some kind of quantization conspiracy, but as someone who started using Claude Code the _moment_ that it came out, it felt particularly strong. Then, it feels like they... tweaked something, whether in CC or Sonnet 3.7 and it went a little downhill. It's still very impressive, but something was lost.

I've found Gemini 2.5 Pro to be extremely impressive and much more able to run in an extended fashion by itself, although I've found very high variability in how well 'agent mode' works between different editors. Cursor has been very very weak in this regard for me, with Windsurf working a little better. Claude Code is excellent, but at the moment does feel let down by the model.

I've been using Aider with Gemini 2.5 Pro and found that it's very much able to 'just go' by itself. I shipped a mode for Aider that lets it do so (sibling comment here) and I've had it do some huge things that run for an hour or more, but assuredly it does get stuck and act stupidly on other tasks as well.

My point, more than anything, is that... I'd try different editors and different (stronger) models and see - and that small tweaks to prompt and tooling are making a big difference to these tools' effectiveness right now. Also, different models seem to excel at different problems, so switching models is often a good choice.