Downvoted for breaking this guideline: "Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
The "It's clickbait" comment at the end made me feel pain for the site buider, and I didn't even put any work into the website. They made a thing and put it out in the world. Some people like it: as evidenced by other comments here.
That they mention the top of the price range instead of the bottom lends a lot of credibility to my mind.
Agreed within the narrow confines of web dev (which is all that I do). I used to write 500-1000? LOC per day but now I've built several full fledged (250k+ arr) sites with more features than I've ever been able to implement in such a short time: all without editing a single line of code.
My guess is they are still very useful for more difficult code! But yeah, I can't imagine ever caring about "code" any more, and therefore cannot fathom the need for a full fledged IDE.
Thank you for this post!
1) I've been considering Zed for a long time, but it hasn't worked well in my KVM. Due to the poor(?) ability to pass GPU through on my Ubuntu 24.04 machine. I have read that 26.04 may have fixed this so I'll try it again!
2) I am in the same boat with slowness. I've been using PHPStorm for over 10 years and it has always been "slow", but the newest pain point is that I will have claude in a terminal update a file. If the file is open in PHPstorm's viewing pain, it might take 10+ seconds to update the contents: I now always "update from disk" if I want to copy the contents outside of my KVM. It's just absolutely terrible workflow.
3. I have also found all of their AI efforts to not only be poorly executed, but executed in poor taste: it's just IN THE WAY rather than being helpful.
4. I mostly don't appreciate most of their features, generally. My flow is pretty simple. I no longer use most of the features. I just don't need the 8000lb elephant any more.
I call this the "Everything in Moderation" fallacy. From what I've heard people who say it, they emphasize the everything part of it. In other words almost everything is bad for you so just eat a little bit of everything and you won't get too much of the bad stuff. It's maddening.
Respectfully disagree. An AI with full access to robots could do everything on its own that it would need to "survive" and grow. I argue that humans are actually in the way of that.
I'm surprised to see so many people using containers when setting up a KVM is so easy, gives the most robust environment possible, and to my knowledge much has better isolation. A vanilla build of Linux plus your IDE of choice and you're off to the races.
For anyone else on the fence about moving to CLI: I'm really glad I did.
I am converting a WordPress site to a much leaner custom one, including the functionality of all plugins and migrating all the data. I've put in about 20 hours or so and I'd be shocked if I have another 20 hours to go. What I have so far looks and operates better than the original (according to the owner). It's much faster and has more features.
The original site took more than 10 people to build, and many months to get up and running. I will have it up single-handedly inside of 1 month, and it will have much faster load times and many more features. The site makes enough money to fully support 2 families in the USA very well.
My Stack: Old school LAMP. PHPstorm locally. No frameworks. Vanilla JS.
Original process: webchat based since sonnet 3.5 came out, but I used Gemini a lot after 2.5 pro came out, but primarily sonnet.
- Use Claude projects for "features". Give it only the files strictly required to do the specific thing I'm working on.
- Have it read the files closely, "think hard" and make a plan
- Then write the code
- MINOR iteration if needed. Sometimes bounce it off of Gemini first.
- the trick was to "know when to stop" using the LLM and just get to coding.
- copy code into PHPStorm and edit/commit as needed
- repeat for every feature. (refresh the claude project each time).
Evolution: Finally take the CLI plunge: Claude Code
- Spin up a KVM: I'm not taking any chances.
- Run PHPStorm + CC in the KVM as a "contract developer"
- the "KVM developer" cannot push to main
- set up claude.md carefully
- carefully prompt it with structure, bounds, and instructions
- run into lots of quirks with lots of little "fixes"
-- too verbose
-- does not respect "my coding style"
-- poor adherence to claude.md instructions when over half way through context, etc
- Start looking into subagents. It feels like it's not really working?
- Instead: I break my site into logical "features"
-- Terminal Tab 1: "You may only work in X folder"
-- Terminal Tab 2: "You may only work in Y folder".
-- THIS WORKS WELL. I am finally in a "HOLY MOLLY, I am now unquestionably more productive territory!"
Codex model comes out
- I open another tab and try it
- I use it until I hit the "You've reached your limit. Wait 3 hour" message.
- I go back to Claude (Man is this SLOW! and Verbose!). Minor irritation.
- Go back to Codex until I hit my weekly limit
- Go back to Claude again. "Oh wow, Codex works SO MUCH BETTER for me".
- I actually haven't fussed with the AGENTS.md, nor do I give it a bunch of extra hand-holding. It just works really well by itself.
- Buy the OpenAI PRO plan and haven't looked back.
I haven't "coded" much since switching to Codex and couldn't be happier. I just say "Do this" and it does it. Then I say "Change this" and it does it. On the rare occasions it takes a wrong turn, I simply add a coding comment like "Create a new method that does X and use that instead" and we're right back on track.
We are 100% at a point where people can just "Tell the computer what you want in a web page, and it will work".
The "It's clickbait" comment at the end made me feel pain for the site buider, and I didn't even put any work into the website. They made a thing and put it out in the world. Some people like it: as evidenced by other comments here.
That they mention the top of the price range instead of the bottom lends a lot of credibility to my mind.