Claude Code: the command line gets agentic (but should it?)

My hands-on with Anthropic's text-based AI coding experiment – interface, output, and honest verdict.

Is the command line about to become the hottest new IDE, thanks to AI? Anthropic's Claude Code is betting on it, but after getting my hands dirty in its terminal-based world, I'm not so sure.

I got the chance to check out Claude Code, Anthropic’s new agentic coding system in the terminal while in research preview. But it is now open for all to check out here . I’m going to give you a glimpse of what Claude Code is, what its capabilities are, my experience building something from scratch on it, the final output, and finally, who this really is for. This post is a bit more technical than usual, but bear with me.

What is Claude Code

First, what is Claude Code, and what is it good for? Claude Code is almost a Cursor-esque agent that you can access in a Terminal. You can point it to a directory where your code lies and then run the `claude` command to activate it.

Claude Code’s key capabilities include:

• Editing files and fixing bugs across your codebase

• Answering questions about your code’s architecture and logic

• Executing and fixing tests, linting, and other commands

• Searching through git history, resolving merge conflicts, and creating commits and PRs

Most of the features that you see are possible in a tool like Cursor, but some of them like searching through git history and resolving merge conflicts, is interesting, and I’m not sure Cursor does it out of the box yet.

As a non-technical PM who has learnt to vibe code, I tried out an example of creating a Roast My LinkedIn Profile app from scratch. Which involved creating new files, folders, editing code, running bash commands, and installing packages.

Let’s take a look at the key parts of Claude Code with this example.

Interface

Like I mentioned previously, the interface is nothing but a Terminal window, which may seem daunting to non-devs but is bread and butter for devs. There are no fancy UI elements like the ones that you would find in an online AI coding app or an IDE like Cursor or Windsurf. You can’t open the files directly unless you use another Terminal window and use something like vim or some other IDE.

So it’s just text prompting, which is a limitation because it doesn’t allow screenshots. You can’t take a screenshot of the error and expect Claude Code to work on it. The external capabilities like images, web search, and tagging files are limited.

Something as small as using text expansion snippets doesn't work in the terminal, so I wasn't able to use my pre-made text expansion snippets so that's another downside of Claude Code.

There are a lot of benefits to using an IDE over the Terminal. Like extensions, visual file management, and now AI chat tools. Only hardcore coders would use the terminal and Vim for coding.

So overall, not a great experience. Even if you're a dev, you would prefer an IDE like Cursor.

Claude Code Terminal interface

Output UI

Here is what the final output was like. As you can see, it clearly didn't create a great UI. It’s left aligned, the buttons are not styled, there’s no visual hierarchy except for the title, and the text box for the link is not wide enough to show the entire link. There’s no semblance of basic aesthetics.

The UI that is possible out of the box using Sonnet 3.7 in the Claude app, in Cursor, or in tools like Lovable and Bolt are far better. It's a dramatic improvement over 3.5. It could be some of the Cursor Rules that I have set or something that the tools are doing themselves, but they do a much better job. So, if I was building something completely from scratch, I wouldn’t use Claude Code to do it.

It might be a good option to update an existing codebase or just the backend code.

Web output of Claude Code

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Pricing

It's also relatively expensive to pay $5 to create a very simple prototype that I could have probably used an app like Lovable, Bolt and just using a free plan got it done or using cursor which would barely take a fraction of the fast request allowance for the entire month by paying $20 a month. So, from a price consideration, it is better to use Cursor.

Pricing after one session

Final Thoughts

Overall, at the moment, I cannot recommend Claude Code over Cursor or other tools for most non-technical or technical folks.

Unless you have an existing codebase that you want to experiment with and try out Claude’s agentic capabilities, it may be worthwhile checking out. But for the rest of us, probably not now.

I'm sure some of the learnings that Anthropic has with Claude Code can go into the next models and, as a result, even further improve what Cursor has to offer.

I truly believe there is a fundamental shift for AI companies like OpenAI and Claude to focus on the app layer rather than just sticking to the foundational model layer. Foundational models drive a lot of the end-user apps like Cursor, Bolt, Lovable, Replit, etc that are generating millions of dollars of revenue.

Cursor, for example, only picked up in usage and popularity after Claude Sonnet 3.5 shipped and made the most of Anthropic’s capabilities. What if Anthropic captures some of that App layer value for themselves by building a better Cursor? I think that’s where Claude Code fits in, by being the first step at the Agentic App layer. Even though a terminal may not be the best interface, even for someone who is extremely experienced at vibe coding, it's a stepping stone in the right direction.

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That’s it for today!

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