Comment by msikora | Hacker News Reader

Comment by msikora | Hacker News Reader

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Just a few months ago I couldn't imagine paying more than $20/mo for any kind of subscription, but here I am paying $200/mo for the Max 20 plan!

Similarly amazed as an experienced dev with 20 YoE (and a fellow Slovak, although US based). The other tools, while helpful, were just not "there" and they were often simply more trouble than they were worth producing a lot of useless garbage. Claude Code is clearly on another level, yes it needs A LOT of handholding; my MO is do Plan Mode until I'm 100% sure it understands the reqs and the planned code changes are reasonable, then let it work, and finally code review what it did (after it auto-fixes things like compiler errors, unit test failures and linting issues). It's kind of like a junior engineer that is a little bit daft but very knowledgeable but works super, super fast and doesn't talk back :)

It is definitely the future, what can I say? This is a clear direction where software development is heading.

When I first tried letting Cursor loose on a relatively small code base (1500 lines, 2 files), I had it fix a bug (or more than one) with a clear testcase and a rough description of the problem, and it was a disaster.

The first commit towards the fix was plausible, though still not fully correct, but in the end not only it wasn't able to fix it, each commit was also becoming more and more baroque. I cut it when it wrote almost 100 lines of code to compare version numbers (which already existed in the source). The problem with discussing the plan is that, while debugging, you don't yourself have a full idea of the plan.

I don't call it a total failure because I asked the AI to improve some error messages to help it debug, and I will keep that code. It's pretty good at writing new code, very good at reviewing it, but for me it was completely incapable of performing maintainance.

These tools and LLMs differ in quality, for me Claude Code with Claude 4 was the first tool that worked well enough. I tried Cursor before, it's been a 6+ months ago though, but I wasn't very impressed.

Same for me. Cursor was a mess for me. I don't know why and how it works for other people. Claude code on the other hand was a success from day one and I'm using it happily for months now.

I used Cursor for about 5 months before switching to Claude Code. I was only productive with Cursor when I used it in a very specific way, which was basically me doing by hand what Claude Code does internally. I maintained planning documents, todo lists, used test driven development and linting tools, etc. My .cursorrules file looks like what I imagine the Claude system prompt to be.

Claude Code took the burden of maintaining that off my shoulders.

Also Cursor was/is utterly useless any all non-Anthropic models, which are the default.

This was a problem I regularly had using Copilot w/ GPT4o or Sonnet 3.5/3.7... sometimes I would end up down a rabbit hole and blow multiple days of work, but more typically I'd be out an hour or two and toss everything to start again.

Don't have this w/ Claude Code working over multiple code bases of 10-30k LOC. Part of the reason is the type of guidance I give in the memory files helps keep this at bay, as does linting (ie. class/file length), but I also chunk things up into features that I PR review and have it refactor to keep things super tidy.

Yeah, Github Copilot just didn't work for me at all. The completions are OK and I actually still use it for that but the agent part is completely useless. Claude Code is in another league.

Fwiw, I dipped my toes into AI assisted coding a few weeks ago and started with cursor. Was very unimpressed (spent more time prompting and fight the tool than making forward progress) until I tried Claude code. Happily dropped cursor immediately (cancelled my sub) and am now having a great time using CC productively (just the basic $20/mo plan). Still needs hand-holding but it's a net productivity boost.

> wrote almost 100 lines of code to compare version numbers

Oh boy, it was almost sentient. That is a deep mathematical proof!

May I ask what you are use it for? I have been using it for fun mostly, side projects, learning, experimenting. I would never use it for work codebase, unless, well, the company ordered or at least permitted it. And even then, I'm not really sure I would feel comfortable with the level of liberty CC takes. So I'm curious about others.

Of course you need an explicit permit from the company to use (non-local) AI tools.

Before that was given, I used AI as a fancier search engine, and for coming up with solutions to problems I explained in abstract (without copy-pasting actual code in or out).

It's our own SaaS we're trying to launch with my partner. So no work-related issues.

> Just a few months ago I couldn't imagine paying more than $20/mo for any kind of subscription, but here I am paying $200/mo for the Max 20 plan!

I wonder, are most devs with a job paying for it themselves, rather than the company they work for?

I'm recently unemployed after 20 continuous years in the industry, trying to launch a SaaS, so yes, paying for it myself.

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