for me, seeing claude code – a cli tool, gaining so much popularity is interesting from a historical point of view:
a rough history of ai coding tools
- github copilot
- chatgpt
- gpt engineer
- cursor
- cursor-clones
- claude code
- ???
the ones that stand out from the list imo are:
- chatgpt: the interface for people to test the limits
- cursor: the 100x better ux compared to copilot or copy/pasting from llm chat interfaces
on the models side, we have:
- gpt 3.5 (implicitly through chatgpt)
- gpt 4.0: improvement in coding + co-existence with cursor
- claude 3.5: the 10x improvement compare to anything else in the market, huge driver for cursor/lovable/... any other vibe-coding tool
just like any new market that needs education, github copilot and chatgpt prepared the market for cursor and cursor, in turn, prepared the market for claude code (and its clones).
the way cursor did it is by being semi-opinionated, giving people a ui to experience what llms can do, just like how chatgpt did for cursor.
but like any ui and abstraction, it has it's own limits. even though tools like cline/roo code/... enabled you to create your own custom agents, they were not deep into the cli.
having a shell access to your computer, the holy grail of programming, + infinite customizability with innovative features like slash commands, hooks, ... (+ building on top of mcp) and not to mention, the performance of claude-4, is taking vibe/programming to the next level.
i suddenly realized this while i was working on my "perfect ai engineering team", and thinking of what i need in my team.
i'll share it when i'm done with it and took it for a spin on real-world problems