From my perspective, Gemini CLI is useless—it’s the only LLM that has repeatedly refused to work with me because of so-called "offensive language." And when it does work it's overly verbose and often just plainly wrong. Codex CLI just feels like a stripped-down version of Claude Code.

Claude Code wins for me for one simple reason: I can just pay for a MAX account and not worry about running out of credits or going through my credit card limit. That makes me use the tool twice as much as the others, where I’m constantly watching my credit balance.

Cursor wins because it was the first big one, not sure if it has any important advantages over claude code anymore.