Comment by sothatsit
6 days ago
I think the way we currently work with agents, through a text context and prompts, is just a very natural fit for the terminal. It is a very simple design and makes it very easy to review the past actions of the agent and continue to guide it through new instructions. And then you can always jump into your IDE when you want to jump around the source code to review it in more detail.
On the other hand, agent integrations in IDEs seem to often add a lot more widgets for interacting with agents, and often they put the agent is in its own little tab off to the side, and I find that harder to work with.
That's why, even though I love using IDEs and have never been a big terminal person, I much prefer using Claude Code in the terminal rather than using tools like Copilot in VSCode (ignoring the code quality differences). I just find it nicer to separate the two.
The portability of being able to really easily run Claude Code in whatever directory you want, and through SSH, is a nice bonus too.
I agree that the current crop of IDE integrations really leave something to be desired.
I've been using Roocode (Cline fork) a lot recently and while it's overall great, the UI is janky and incomplete feeling. Same as Cursor and all the others.
I tried Claude Code after hearing great things and it was just Roocode with a worse UX (for me). Most of the people telling me how great it was were talking up the output as being amazing quality. I didn't notice that. I presume the lack of IDE integration makes it feel more magical. This is fun while you're vibing the "first 80%" of your product, but eventually the agents need much more hand holding and collaborative edits to keep things on track.