Eric Buess

Eric Buess @EricBuess · May 27 Also love attaching to my tmux session via ssh tool (e.g. Blink shell) from anywhere I am over passkey authenticated mosh from any of my devices to continue work started on my Mac Mini or MacBook Pro. I can keep working from anywhere. I port forward these and web ports for testing. x.com/ericbuess/stat... [Attached photo: laptop lid with "Claude" and Anthropic sunburst logo sticker plus Apple logo, next to a device info panel reading "MacBook Pro / 16-inch, Nov 2024" with a "Clau..." entry below]

**Eric Buess** @EricBuess [2025-05-16](https://x.com/EricBuess/status/1923446661730156789) Both. Can’t stop to write out or link to reasons write now but I will try to do it when I can. Heading to take four kids to the Dallas area for my oldest daughter’s swim meet. 😀 --- **echo.hive** @hive\_echo [2025-05-16](https://x.com/hive_echo/status/1923447085774328147) it would be nie to hear your take on it. have a fun day! --- **Eric Buess** @EricBuess [2025-05-17](https://x.com/EricBuess/status/1923536975375528031) Hey! I have used all the major agent IDEs and compared them against one another in their max/pro paid subscription plans. I've been vibe coding since long before it was a term - I think since around when the first Codex came out in 2021. I know you are very experienced in this domain as well, and I have absolutely loved watching your content since the early days! Each agentic editor has its trade-offs. The models they support and the scaffolding they provide on top of them change so often, with each tool leapfrogging the abilities of their competitors at various points. It's hard to solidly recommend any single tool for a large group of people. I'm not saying that my preferred tool for the moment is the best in all cases for all people. Here's what I've learned: I spent months building my own custom Agentic IDE using all the major models that integrate into existing tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and Visual Studio Code. It was a standalone tool built with Python and Node. This experience brought me to some conclusions about what really makes a good agentive editor and collaborator, and how to optimally design workflows to get the most out of an AI model while avoiding as much friction as possible. One of the most important things when asking for a change is making sure that the model has as much signal and as little noise as possible. In other words, every token of superfluous or irrelevant content that doesn't help it understand exactly the context needed to solve the problem is a distraction that lowers the quality of the output and introduces pain for the human. The largest pain point I see from these tools is creating too many files or code in places that should have been updated in existing classes or methods in files that just needed to be refactored a bit, for example. This problem is exacerbated by test-time compute models whose reinforcement learning included a lot of examples and rewards around writing extra code to solve the problem. Even the smartest model - say, a powerful superintelligence - is going to have to make assumptions where we leave ambiguity. Part of our job as communicators and directors of these agentic systems is to specify exactly what we do and do not need. Where ambiguity remains, these very intelligent models will carry on with their assumptions and lead to extraneous code or duplicate implementations only to the degree to which we did not tell them to do otherwise or we did not provide the appropriate code in the context. This brings me to what I love about Claude Code. There may be a simple way to get Windsurf and Cursor to read in the entire content of a large file that I tag with an @ reference, but I spent far too many hours over far too many weeks trying to get it to do so. Because these tools use RAG to read in chunks of data from files if those files are long, they will quite often miss relevant chunks. And while the vector search retrieval mechanisms are quite spectacular compared to the standards from a year ago, I still find myself in the constant battle of trying to get just the right amount of context with that extraneous code to the model. Claude Code, on the other hand, doesn't just index the code in a vector store. It is just about as close to the bare model as an agentic editor can be. It basically has some instructions for how to use POSIX commands in a bash tool. It has no problem whatsoever reading in the entire contents of a file and does an excellent job at understanding semantically which files should be searched for and finding those files. This is not to say that it is perfect. I would say there's still quite a lot of room for improvement. I still find myself fighting with it to keep the file count from creeping up. However, with a few simple instructions in the Claude config file in the home directory or in the project directory itself, it rarely if ever suffers from this problem. I also really love the rate of improvement of Claude Code. They are rolling out updates every couple of days. Some of my favorite ones in the last few weeks are the auto-compact command, which means I never need to start a new cascade or agent conversation like I would in Windsurf or Cursor. It will automatically compact the conversation which generates a summary of what has been done and what's next without me needing to say anything to prompt it to do so. But if I'm feeling like the next task may push it towards its context limit to the point that the output quality might be reduced, I can preemptively trigger the compact command. Also, when I start Claude in a directory, I can do so with a flag to prevent it from asking me to verify things explicitly. I know there are checkboxes for this in the other Agentic IDEs, but some are not aware that Claude Code has this as well. Vibe coding is fully unlocked. Another favorite feature is when the project loads it has something akin to Cursor rules or Windsurf rules, and that is a http://CLAUDE.md file which is read in both when Claude is started as well as when you run the /clear command. Any files that are referenced in that http://CLAUDE.md file with an @ symbol prepended will be read into context as well. I also love how it can be opened with -p flag and given a task to accomplish. So you can pipe claude -p commands together in a chain. It's super powerful. Claude can spin up its own subagents or you can have it write scripts to launch them however you like. Or you can trigger them from Claude Desktop which you can give filesystem and bash access to whatever directories you want. It also supports / commands you can set by adding simple files to the project. You can run multiple claude codes in parallel. I even play with have the root one be an orchestrator that just defines interfaces and a shared folder with a few files and the http://CLAUDE.md files for each sub directory and then it spins up new claude instances in those subdirectories to accomplish the tasks they find when they read in their dirs http://CLAUDE.md. There are so many different ways to use it. It's all about a well defined http://CLAUDE.md. You can use -c or -r to continue or resume specific previous sessions. You can # to add things to http://CLAUDE.md at each level. It supports vim keys. It can run in the integrated terminal of any IDE that supports that. I love the terminal and am comfortable in tools like tux and vim but I sometimes want gui to see files. So I tend to use iterm2 for native bell notifications when it's done working and Zed editor for silky smooth IDE with the electron bloat. Zed Preview is adding good agentic features. All the IDEs support MCP servers these days, but the Claude Desktop app and Claude Code are from the company that built the protocol and provide as close to the full functionality as I need. I use Claude Desktop in conjunction with Claude Code often. It checks my emails and schedules school events on my calendar, so I know when to have my kids where. It's tied into 15 different MCP servers and is a central hub for all the agentic tasks that I can trigger remotely if needed. The Claude mobile app integrates with connections established on the website, and I believe/hope will eventually integrate with remote MCP servers through http://claude.ai/. Claude artifacts, inline editing with much more context and speed than Canvas, and rendering web artifacts and publishing/sharing are really incredible features. On top of all this, Claude research now returns consistently over a thousand websites in a search, and I regularly compare its results to all the other researching tools from the major providers. It is not behind anymore. It is a new product but has caught up in quality in the last week. Another great feature is the power of the Claude 3.7 Sonnet model with extended thinking. I know there are benchmarks and ELO scores, and people swear by their favorite model across the industry. But if you look at SWE Bench verified scores and the way that the scores were assessed compared to the other models, nobody is really beating Claude 3.7 Sonnet. The most recent reporting I've heard out of the major agentic IDE companies is that their devs still tend to prefer Claude 3.7 Sonnet internally. I really enjoy how I can just tell Claude to "think" or "think deeply" and that will trigger more compute to be allocated to the task at hand. And Claude models are released about every 3-4 months on average, so it's not long until we'll get another big update. And this brings me to a penultimate point. I've tested many different projects across all of the major agentic IDEs - same projects, same starting positions, same instructions, same prompts. Claude 3.7 Sonnet may not always win, but it's never at the bottom. However, Claude 3.7 Sonnet within Claude Code is almost always at the top. There's something to be said about the company that makes the model also creating the scaffolding and providing the tool and the low-level interface to the model. For example, they could be allowing different API parameters to unlock portions of the model that are not accessible to other IDEs. I'm not saying they are, but the performance seems to be better when run through Claude Code. This is likely just the way they are prompting the model and the tools they are choosing to use, and the benefits they are gaining from not indexing the files and calling back chunks. But I'm just speculating. A very important reason for me to prefer Claude Code is that it uses the token allocation assigned every 5 hours to my Claude Mac subscription. It was such a problem for me, as I'm sure it is for many others, to have to pay for a subscription to web interfaces and also agentic IDEs and sometimes API requests. I wrote those custom extensions and tools to make my own Agentic IDE to avoid paying additional fees. By creating a local API endpoint, the IDEs could call with their agents or I could call with my own tools using a browser extension to interact with the web interfaces and stream data back and forth. I made a request to Anthropic via a Zoom call and DM asking if they could allow some of our token allocations from our web subscriptions to be utilized by Agentic editors. If they were to do this, it would mean that we could only pay for the web interface subscription and not need to pay anything additional for API requests, as an example. And that is what they have done with their Claude Max subscription and Claude Code. I don't have a need to pay $20/month for some Agentic IDE to unlock pro models when I have a http://claude.ai/ Max subscription. Claude Code will just use tokens available to me on that subscription, and it resets every 5 hours. I've yet to hit the limit in any 5-hour period. So it's essentially free and unlimited access to a top-tier coding agent baked into the price of a subscription I would already be paying for. But there is one last note that is of incredible importance and is only tangential to Claude Code itself. I'm a big fan of Anthropic AI because their core mission and reason for existence is the best hope I think we have for long-term stable society. Without their leadership in steerable, harmless, constitutional AI, constitutional classifiers, and the vast amount of dollars and time they're putting into mechanistic interpretability research, I don't see much hope that we understand what's happening inside of powerful AI systems before they attain fast takeoff through iterative self-improvement with fewer humans in the loop. Current AI systems are largely jailbreakable, which means that if the next generation or two of such models are still jailbreakable, it's almost guaranteed they'll be in the hands of thousands, then millions, over time of extremists who have the motive to do harm to their ideological opposites but only lack the means. These AI systems they will have access to will have both the ability to reduce friction in attaining these means and be jailbreakable with a prompt copied off the internet unless we find a solution now. I'm not just talking about things that anyone can find with a Google search. Foundation models trained in chemistry or powerful AI systems that understand physics and math can derive solutions that cause harm on a massive scale. I'm not saying that I'm against everyone having access to AI systems. Open source is an antidote to the tyranny that comes with the consolidation of power. But open source without the ability to understand what's happening in powerful, superintelligent systems is giving enormous ability to do harm to massive numbers of people (over time) who wish to do harm. I believe the work Anthropic AI is doing is urgent. All things being equal, I would rather give more of my money to the company that is giving us the best hope of creating models that cannot be jailbroken by extremists who copy a prompt off the internet. This research is being and will continue to be disseminated to all other model providers for integration into systems that will make the world on average far safer. This is my hope and conviction. This is why I'm engaged in the Anthropic Bug Bounty Program that I need to get back to now. I have four children. I expect to have more descendants. I feel a moral obligation to invest in the company that I believe is going to have the best shot at helping us all make it through this potential AI great filter. I hope others can start to see this and vote for safety with their money.