> TBH Claude Code is surprisingly shit to use given the technical resources and the amount of money behind it. Looking past the bugs and missing features, it's so obvious it's not built by people who care about the product from a developer/craftsman perspective. It's missing all the signs of polish/care, it feels like someone shipped an internal PoC to prod and kept hacking on it.

I don't wholly disagree, but personally it's still the tool I use and it's sort of fine. Perhaps not entirely for the money that's behind it, as you said, but it could be worse.

The CLI experience is pretty okay, although the auth is kinda weird (e.g. when trying to connect to AWS Bedrock). There's a permission system and sandboxing, plan mode and TODOs, decent sub-agent support, instruction files and custom skills, tool calls and LSP support and all the other stuff you'd expect. At least no weird bugs like I had with OpenCode where trying to paste multi-line content inside of a Windows Terminal session lead to the tool closing and every next line getting pasted in an executed in the terminal one by one, that was weird, though I will admit that using Windows feels messed up quite often nowadays even without stuff like that.

The desktop app gives you chat and cowork and code, although it almost feels like Cowork is really close to what Code does (and for some reason Cowork didn't seem to support non-OS drives?). Either way, the desktop app helps me not juggle terminal sessions and keeps a nice history in the sidebar, has a pretty plan display, easy ways of choosing permissions and worktrees, although I will admit that it can be sluggish and for some actions there just aren't progress indicators which feels oddly broken.

I wonder what they spend most of their time working on and why the basics aren't better, though to Anthropic's credit about a month ago the desktop Code section was borderline unusable on Windows when switching between two long conversations, which now seems to take a few seconds (which is still a few seconds too long, but at least usable).

> TBH Claude Code is surprisingly shit to use given the technical resources and the amount of money behind it.

What harness would you recommend instead?

Isn't Anthropic basically a bunch of AI PhDs writing code? I'd imagine they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into actual software engineering.

The most obvious sign to me from the start that somebody wasn't really paying attention to how the Claude app(s) work is that on iOS, you have to leave the app active the entire time a response is streaming or it will error out.