Back in July, when I stopped opening IDEs entirely and committed to Claude Code through my MPM orchestration setup, people looked at me like I’d lost my mind. The conventional wisdom was clear: Cursor was the future, IDE integration was table stakes, and CLI-based agentic tools were for hobbyists and contrarians.
I wasn’t trying to make a statement. I just found that multi-agent orchestration through the command line worked better for how I actually build software. Augment Code became my backup for when Claude had hiccups. The whole setup felt like an outlier position I’d have to defend for years.
Six months later, I’m seeing senior engineers publicly validate the same approach. Whether the industry “caught up” or I got lucky with timing, the shift is undeniable.
Two posts that crystallized the moment
Two posts crossed my feed this week that captured something I’ve been sensing for months. First, Boris Cherny—the creator of Claude Code and author of O’Reilly’s Programming TypeScript—dropped this:
“In the last thirty days, I landed 259 PRs—497 commits, 40k lines added, 38k lines removed. Every single line was written by Claude Code + Opus 4.5.”
When someone pushed back, he doubled down: “Correct. In the last thirty days, 100% of my contributions to Claude Code were written by Claude Code.” He mentioned he didn’t open an IDE at all last month. The tool is increasingly contributing to its own development—a strange loop that says something about where we’re headed.
Then Jaana Dogan, a Principal Engineer at Google responsible for the Gemini API, posted something that got 3.2 million views:
“I’m not joking and this isn’t funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned... I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour.”
A Google Principal Engineer. Working on the competing Gemini API. Publicly crediting Anthropic’s tool. She clarified later that the prompt contained “the best ideas that survived” from Google’s internal work—so not a cold start. But still: an hour versus a year.
November was the inflection point
The timeline tells a story. Claude Code launched as a research preview in February 2025. By July, 115,000 developers were processing 195 million lines of code weekly. But the real shift happened in November when Opus 4.5 dropped.
What changed: first model over 80% on SWE-Bench Verified (80.9%), massive price reduction from $15/$75 to $5/$25 per million tokens, and up to 76% fewer tokens required for equivalent tasks. The cost ceiling that had constrained heavy agentic usage dropped away.
Anthropic hasn’t disclosed official revenue figures for Claude Code specifically, but industry reports suggest it hit substantial scale within six months of public launch—fast growth even by AI standards.
The broader context reinforces the shift. Stack Overflow’s 2025 developer survey shows majority AI tool adoption, though exact weekly usage figures vary by how you slice the data. Google’s Sundar Pichai claimed AI writes “more than a quarter” of new Google code in late 2024—some reports extrapolate higher figures now, though primary sourcing is thin. Anthropic’s CEO has made aggressive claims about internal AI code generation, though these are promotional rather than audited.
Senior engineers documenting the shift
There’s a pattern I keep seeing in senior engineer posts. Initial skepticism, then a specific experience that changes their mind. I recognize it because I went through the same thing.
Trevor Dilley, CTO of Twenty20 Ideas, was on vacation in March when he set Claude Code to work on a hobby project. As covered in MIT Technology Review: “It completed a four-hour task in two minutes, and the code was better than what I would have written.” He’s since cofounded DevSwarm, building software for parallel coding agents.
Vincent Quigley, Staff Software Engineer at Sanity, documented his six-week journey: “Until 18 months ago, I wrote every line of code myself. Today, AI writes 80% of my initial implementations while I focus on architecture, review, and steering multiple development threads simultaneously.” His framing: “Treating AI like a ‘junior developer who doesn’t learn’ became my mental model for success.”
Filippo Valsorda, a respected open-source cryptography maintainer, blogged about debugging a complex low-level bug with Claude Code: “I am sharing this because it made me realize I still don’t have a good intuition for when to invoke AI tools.”
What strikes me about these accounts: they’re not hype pieces. Quigley’s post is titled “First attempt will be 95% garbage.” Valsorda’s takeaway is that he’s still learning when to use the tools. The validation comes with caveats.
Why CLI beats IDE for agentic workflows
The migration from Cursor and Windsurf to Claude Code and Codex CLI has practical drivers. CLI tools enable autonomous execution across multi-step workflows without IDE constraints. You can script them, automate them, run multiple instances in parallel. Try running five simultaneous agents in a GUI.
Context window reliability matters too. Claude Code’s 200k-token context window stays consistent, while Cursor’s variable capacity drops older context for performance. One Builder.io engineer reported: “We have a React component that’s 18,000 lines long... No AI agent has ever successfully updated this file except Claude Code.”
The cost math is compelling. One developer documented their switch: same workload that cost $830 on Cursor was achievable for $80 on Claude Code. Claude Code’s $100/month Max plan offers unlimited usage, which removes the anxiety of per-token billing that made heavy agentic workflows feel risky.
Daniel Moka from Craft Better Software: “I stopped using Cursor. I moved fully to Claude Code. After trying both side by side with my team, the conclusion was clear: Claude Code felt decisively better for the kind of deep refactoring work we do.”
My multi-tool workflow (and I’m not alone)
Here’s how my setup has evolved. Claude Code through MPM handles the heavy lifting—complex architecture, multi-file refactoring, anything requiring deep context understanding. I’ve been working this way since June.
Augment Code is my backup for when Claude has issues, but it’s become more than that. I actually run it on servers I manage for ops work. Faster, cheaper, and I don’t need multi-agent orchestration for operations tasks. Quick debugging sessions, remote work when I can’t keep my laptop running—it fills a specific niche.
Codex handles documentation cleanup and skills development. It’s cheaper and runs on existing ChatGPT Plus subscriptions. I don’t trust it as much for core coding, but for generating documentation, cleaning up README files, building out AGENTS.md configurations? Works well.
I wondered if anyone else had landed on similar patterns. Turns out Simon Willison described running “multiple terminal windows with different coding agents in different directories”—mixing Claude Code and Codex CLI. A Stark Insider workflow uses VS Code with Claude Code on the left and Cursor on the right, same repo but different branches, giving both the same prompt and diffing their approaches.
Different tools for different jobs. The multi-tool future isn’t about picking a winner.
Community sentiment is consolidating
Hacker News threads show where developer opinion is landing. On “What makes Claude Code so damn good” (469 points, 304 comments), production experiences dominated the discussion. Anonymous commenters sharing results deserve less weight than named engineers, but the volume and consistency of reports is notable.
Based on my own reading of Reddit threads over the past few months—probably 200+ comments across r/ClaudeAI and related subs—Claude Code generates more discussion than Codex by a wide margin, with most comparisons favoring Claude Code for workflow and speed. That’s not a formal sentiment analysis, just pattern recognition from spending too much time on Reddit.
What this means
Six months ago, eschewing IDEs for CLI-based agentic development felt like a contrarian bet. Now Boris Cherny doesn’t open an IDE. Now a Google Principal Engineer credits Claude Code for outperforming her team’s year-long effort. Senior engineers are documenting their workflows publicly, with real caveats and real numbers.
The IDE era isn’t ending entirely. But for agentic workflows—multi-step, autonomous, codebase-spanning tasks—CLI tools have proven superior for a growing number of engineers. The industry caught up faster than I expected. Or maybe I just happened to be standing where the wave landed.
In Part 2, I’ll talk about what comes after the CLI. Because if the pattern holds, the command line is just the current waypoint, not the final destination.
I’m Bob Matsuoka, writing about agentic coding and AI-powered development at HyperDev. For more on my multi-agent orchestration approach, read my analysis of Orchestration Beats Raw Power or my deep dive into the economics of heavy AI development.
This breakdown of the CLI shift is razor-sharp. The Jaana Dogan example really cuts through the noise, when a Principal Engineer at Google builds in an hour what their team iterated on for a year, that's not just tooling it's a fundamental workflow realignment. I tried the multi-tool appoach last quarter (Claude for arch, lighter tools for docs) and the context window consistency alone justfied the switch. IDE's still have a place but orchestartion at the terminal just handles complexity better once you get past the initial learning curve.