Comment by retinaros

4 days ago

too expensive. I cant understand why everyone is into claude code vs using claude in cursor or windsurf.

I think it depends a lot on how you value your time. I'm personally willing to spend hundreds or thousands per month happily if it saves me enough hours. I'd estimate that if I were to do consulting, I'd likely be charging in the $150-250 per hour range, so by my math, it's pretty easy to justify any tools that save me even a few hours per month.

  • Or, increasingly, how the company values your time. If Claude Code can make a $100K/year dev 10% more productive, it's worth it to the employer to pay anything under $1600/month for it (assuming fully loaded cost of the employee to the business is twice salary).

  • ok but in what way a terminal is a bettter UI than an IDE? I am trying all of them on a weekly basis and windsurf UX seems miles ahead/ more efficient than a terminal. that is also what OAI believes or else they wouldnt try to buy it

    • I like the terminal UX because VS Code (and any forks of it) is not my editor of choice, and swapping around to use an editor just for AI coding is annoying (I was doing that with the Zed Assistant a lot).

      With Claude Code I can stay in Goland, and have Claude Code in the terminal.

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    • After I have a session going on, the Claude Code terminal app has been given the permission to do everything I want it to. Then I just let it burn itself out doing whatever. It's a background task. That's the big advantage. I don't baby sit it.

    • Not a better UI at all but seems like they're able to then focus on what matters in these early stages and that's quality of output.

  • You get the same results for cheaper by using a different tool (Windsurf's better imho).

    • That may be, but I think tools with a fixed monthly fee are always going to have an incentive to reduce their own costs on the backend and route you toward less capable models, cut down context size, produce less output, stop before the task is truly finished, etc.

      Given how much time these models can save me, I'd rather optimize for capability and just accept whatever the price is as a cost of doing business. (Within reason I guess—I probably wouldn't go beyond $2-3k per month at this point, unless there was very clear ROI on that spend.)

      Also, it's not only about saving time. More powerful AI tools allow me to build things it would otherwise be impossible to build... that's just as important as the time/cost equation.

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    • I've spent more than 40 hours/week and close to $1,000 in API credits using these tools. For me the ranking goes. But, we all will have difference experiences.

      1. Claude Code 2. Cursor 3. Cline. 4. Windsurf

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  • How do you price this in? If you’re charging by the hour, paying out of pocket to reduce your hours seems self-defeating unless you raise your rates enough to cover both the costs and the lost hours. I can’t imagine too many clients would accept “I’m very expensive per hour because I’m fast, because I get AI to do most of it.”

Claude Code has been able to produce results equivalent to a junior engineer. I spent about $300 API credits in a month but got the value out of it far surpassing that.

Anecdotally, Claude code performs much better than Claude within Cursor. Not sure if it’s a system prompt thing or if I’ve just convinced myself of it because the aesthetic is so much better, but either way the end result feels better to me.

I tried switching from Claude Code to both Cursor and Windsurf. Neither of the latter IDEs fully support MCP implementations (missing basic things like tool definitions and other vital features last time I tried) and both have been riddled with their own agentic flow issues (cursor going down for a week a bit ago, windsurf requiring paid upgrades to "get around" bugs, etc).

This is all ignoring the controversies that pop up around e.g. Cursor seemingly every week. As an IDE, they're both getting there -- but I have objectively better results in Claude Code.

that's what my Ramp card is for.

seriously though, anything that makes me smarter and more productive has a threshold in the thousands-of-dollars range, not hundreds

Why is using cursor with sonnet cheaper than using claude code?

  • probably because cursor is betting on many paying people not using their tool to full extend. Like people paying on their gym memberships but not going to the gym.

    Or they are burning VC money.

    • I've read anecdotal evidence that it uses tokens more sparingly than Claude Code - supported by the, likewise anecdotal, evidence that Claude Code is more effective in practice. However, that would be reasonable, as basically 1-3 sessions with Claude Code cost what a whole month of Cursor costs.