— 2 min read
I bounced off of Cursor a couple of months ago. It was good having code in context in the sidebar, a leg up from cutting and pasting, but I found its agent UI confusing and it made odd edits. In addition, when I left it open for a week, it’d progressively get less responsive to keystrokes. I ended up going with Zed for the editor.
When I tried Claude Code, I initially didn’t find it all that great. It could have been the domain I was working in (writing a DBSP implementation for incremental compute), but I found that its design and architectural choices were all wrong in subtle ways. In addition, I’d try reviewing every single edit. Which was all slow, time consuming, and I’d be out of $80 with no code to show for it.
What I found finally worked is just letting go and having the vibe wash over you. (I also changed over to a domain coding agents are more familiar with—web apps) Break down tasks to something a junior can tackle. If there’s something more complex, I chat with o3 on all the design questions and issues. Once satisfied, I tell it to write me a prompt for a coding agent in the form of a PRD.