I would also like to know this. I've only very briefly looked into Claude code and I may just not understand how I'm supposed to be using it.
I currently use cursor with Claude 4 Sonnet (thinking) in agent mode and it is absolutely crushing it.
Last night i had it refactor some Django / react / vite / Postgres code for me to speed up data loading over websocket and it managed to:
- add binary websocket support via a custom hook
- added missing indexes to the model
- clean up the data structure of the payload
- add messagepack and gzip compression
- document everything it did
- add caching
- write tests
- write and use scripts while doing the optimizations to verify that the approaches it was attempting actually sped up the transfer
All entirely unattended. I just walked away for 10 minutes and had a sandwich.
The best part is that the code it wrote is concise, clean, and even stylistically similar to the existing codebase.
If claude code can improve on that I would love to know what I am missing!
My best comparison is that it's like MacBooks/iPhones etc.
Apple builds both the hardware and the software so it feels harmonious and well optimized.
Anthropic build the model and the tool and it just works, although sonnet 4 in cursor is good too but if you've got the 20$ plan often you're crippled on context size (not sure if that's true with sonnet 4 specifically).
I had actually heard about the OpenAI Codex CLI before Claude Code and had the same thought initially, not understanding the appeal.
Give it a shot and maybe you'll change your mind, I just tried because of the hype and the hype was right for once.
I currently use cursor with Claude 4 Sonnet (thinking) in agent mode and it is absolutely crushing it.
Last night i had it refactor some Django / react / vite / Postgres code for me to speed up data loading over websocket and it managed to:
- add binary websocket support via a custom hook - added missing indexes to the model - clean up the data structure of the payload - add messagepack and gzip compression - document everything it did - add caching - write tests - write and use scripts while doing the optimizations to verify that the approaches it was attempting actually sped up the transfer
All entirely unattended. I just walked away for 10 minutes and had a sandwich.
The best part is that the code it wrote is concise, clean, and even stylistically similar to the existing codebase.
If claude code can improve on that I would love to know what I am missing!