Comment by kentonv
5 days ago
Dude. Claude Code has zero learning curve. You just open the terminal app in your code directory and you tell it what you want, in English. In the time you have spent writing these comments about how you don't care to try it now because it's probably just hype, you could have actually tried it and found out if it's just hype.
I've tried Claude Code repeatedly and haven't figured out how to make it work for me on my work code base. It regularly gets lost, spins out of control, and spends a bunch of tokens without solving anything. I totally sympathize with people who find Claude Code to have a learning curve, and I'm writing this while waiting for Cursor to finish a task I gave it, so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with the tooling in general.
One big problem with Claude Code vs Cursor is that you have to pay for the cost of getting over the learning curve. With Cursor I could eat the subscription fee and then goof off for a long time trying to figure out how to prompt it well. With Claude Code a bad prompt can easily cost me $5 a pop, which (irrationally, but measurably) hurts more than the one-time monthly fee for Cursor.
Claude Code actually has a flat-rate subscription option now, if you prefer that. Personally I've found the API cost to be pretty negligible, but maybe I'm out of touch. (I mean, it's one AI-generated commit, Michael. What could it cost, $5?)
Anyway, if you've tried it and it doesn't work for you, fair enough. I'm not going to tell you you're wrong. I'm just bothered by all the people who are out here posting about AI being bad while refusing to actually try it. (To be fair, I was one of them, six months ago...)
I could not have, because my standards involve more than a five minute impression from a tool designed to wow people in the first five minutes. Dude.
I think you're rationalizing your resistance to change. I've been there!
I have no reason to care whether you use AI or not. I'm giving you this advice just for your sake: Consider whether you are taking a big career risk by avoiding learning about the latest tools of your profession.