Claude code or something else?

Soldato
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I've recently cancelled Github Copilot which I found pretty good but I'm looking for an alternative. I've been looking Claude code which looks good and I'm just wondering if there are any other options to look at? I'll mainly be using it in Visual Studio Code, Xcode and Android Studio.
 
CC is still the best for coding as far as I’m concerned. Gemini and GPT probably have higher limits on the lower plans though so depends on your requirements and budget.
 
Claude is good, whether it's better than others and the writing is already on the wall for fixed price plans. Enjoy it while you can, I guess.
 
Claude is hands down the best agentic coding tool and has been consistently for some time. Their tools generally lead the way for the competition.

Opus 4.7 and 4.8 were really step changes that made it properly good at doing all sorts of production grade code. The models were too eager to please at first and prioritised satisfying prompts over good code but they have got much better.

Fable 5 is *really* good, but frighteningly expensive. I’m making use of the limited time it’s available on Max plans to get a lot of work done. Won’t be very useful at API rates sadly, it the model must be absolutely massive.
 
I have unlimited access to Claude Code (all models bar Fable 5, for now). It's outrageous how good it is.

I've built a really complex prototype for refactoring Pivotal Cloud Foundry-dependant Spring Boot apps at large scale to Amazon ECS in about 6 hours, just using prompts. Would've taken me 4+ weeks to hand crank it out.

Code:
/effort ultracode
helps a bit :)
 
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Realistically, we need to get used to only AI that is useful at API rates.
There’ll always be an economic case for the fixed price subscription model with usage limits. Anthropic is expecting to turn a profit imminently so they can’t be loss-leading too badly on Claude Max.

You can run Claude code on local models. Push comes to shove you buy local hardware and run it yourself. The distilled models are getting better all the time.
 
There’ll always be an economic case for the fixed price subscription model with usage limits. Anthropic is expecting to turn a profit imminently so they can’t be loss-leading too badly on Claude Max.

You can run Claude code on local models. Push comes to shove you buy local hardware and run it yourself. The distilled models are getting better all the time.
Copilot's move to usage-based will signal the rest of the market. At least it'll make corporates think harder about replacing employees with AI given the substantial price difference.

Will probably get cheaper models in the future because my coding model doesn't need to know about lawn maintenance.
 
I mean it feels natural/obvious that prices will go up, aren't most of these companies bleeding money and it's only the comical investment/hype bubble smoothing things over at the moment?

Claude is still considered the best, have been trying 'Junie' recently as it's included as part of Rider via work and it seems ok for bits and bobs, haven't drunk the kool aid of agentic coding yet so will see.
 
I really need to have a look at Claude code that hasn’t been setup by the company that I work for… admittedly I’ve not bothered looking at the HLD or the LLD for it.

But I just can’t get anything it gives me to work.. spent an hour with it to try and get the syntax to sed some text from the results output of another set of commands that’s been piped.. ended up within stack and getting the answer in 2 minutes.

Been speaking to a colleague at work, and he says that I’m too precise with it and I have to speak to it more generally like I would to a child.. then it will work.

I doubt if what I’m doing is that niche for Claude not to understand, but I think we (as the company) are running it on our own servers to ring fence off the data as we are highly regulated and wouldn’t want any data leaking out.
 
Had Claude Fable running a task for me on Friday while I was doing the Crossword in another window. It ran a test of something and ended up typing "Help" into the crossword. That was a bit freaky.
 
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