Comment by retinaros
4 days ago
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.
You could also try JetBrains' Junie and Sourcegraph Cody.
windsurf also have plugins to jetbrains - they rebranded the whole company from codeium to windsurf and their jetbrains plugin also support cascade.
I was very unimpressed with their original AI assistance implementation, so I’m gonna wait to see some user stories / reviews before I put my time into that, and so far I have seen effectively no mention of Junie anywhere.
Moreover, there’s no way to bring your own key, with the highest subscription tier being $20 per month flat it seems, which is the cost of just 1-3 sessions with Claude Code. Thus, without evidence to the contrary, I’m not holding my breath for now.
One thing that is clearly better in the terminal is secrets management/environment variables.
It's also much easier to control execution in a structured and reliable way in the terminal. Here's an automated debugging use case, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-_76U_nK0Y
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.