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.
It’s not up to the skeptics to prove this tech doesn’t work, it’s up to the proponents to show it does and does so with a similar effect size as cigarettes cause lung cancer.
There are a tremendous amount of LLM productivity stans on HN but the plural of anecdote is not data.
Certainly these tools are useful, but the extent to which they are useful today is not nearly as open and shut as you and others would claim. I’d say that these tools make me 5% more productive on a code base I know well.
I’m totally open to opposing evidence that isn’t just anecdote
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.
Not busting my quota is simply not my top priority. I'm on their $200/month plan and I have it locked to a $1000/month overage limit, though the most I've ever gone through using it every day, all day is about $700. That probably sounds like a lot if you're optimizing for a $20/month token budget, but it's budgeted for. That $10-12k/year is excellent value for the silly amount of functionality that I've been able to create.
Sonnet is a really good LLM, and you can build great things with it. However, if you're using this for serious work, IMO you probably want to use the most productive tools available.
Opus 4.1 was, to be real, punishingly expensive. It made me sweat. Thank goodness that Opus 4.5 is somehow both much better and much cheaper.
Edit, I see you answered this in another response, thanks.
I don't have any interest in yucking anyone's yum, but for me, I find working in and IDE to be vastly more productive than trying to remember dozens of vim and tmux shortcuts.
I haven't personally tried the CC extension because like you, I concluded that it sounds like a single-company Cursor with way fewer points of integration into the IDE.
I hate bikeshedding and rarely do I switch tooling unless something is demonstrably better; preferably 10x better. For me, the Cursor IDE experience is easily 10x better than copying and pasting from ChatGPT, which is why I created this thread in the first place.
The framing of your question as though I might possibly be hallucinating my own situation might be correlated to your lack of reply.
I didn't reply because I haven't had available energy to properly analyze your reply. At a glance, your reply does seem completely reasonable, which is why I upvoted it.