That said... I jumped to a few random moments in your video and had an "oh my god" reaction because you really were not kidding when you said that you were pasting code.
I'm pretty much begging you to install and use Cursor. Whatever boost you're getting from your current workflow, you will see triple through use of their Agent/Plan/Debug modes, especially when using Opus 4.5. I promise you: it's a before electricity vs after electricity scenario. I'm actually excited for you.
A lot of folks will tell you to use Claude Code. I personally find that it doesn't make sense for the sorts of projects I work on; I would 100% start with Cursor either way.
Would you be willing to go into more detail about that claim?
CC seems best suited to situations where one or both of the following are true:
- presence of CI infrastructure
- the ability for the agent to run/test outputs from the run loop
If you're primarily working on embedded hardware, human-in-the-loop is not optional. In real terms, I am the CI infrastructure.
Also, working on hardware means that I am often discussing the circuit with the LLM in a much more collaborative way than what most folks seem to do with CC requirements. There are MCP servers for KiCAD but they don't seem to do more than integrate with BOM management. The LLMs understand EE better than many engineers do, but they can only understand my circuit (and the decisions embedded in it) as well as I can explain/screencap it to them.
The SDK and tooling for the MCUs also just makes an IDE with extensions a much more ergonomic fit than trying to do everything through CLI command switches.