My Experience with Claude Code After 2 Weeks of Adventures

My Experience With Claude Code After 2 Weeks of Adventures 17 Jul, 2025 Hatching... Cursor Shenanigans Cursor, my beloved, started rate limiting shenanigans a few days back. For a good 2 weeks after June 16, 2025, we had almost infinite API request access. I had a lot of code-related work around this time as I was working on Gumroad bounties plus my AI engineering/LLM eval-related consulting work. Apart from just codegen, I also use these tools to onboard/understand codebases faster and just ask a lot of questions in general. cursor rate limiting shenanigans starting to kick in pic.twitter.com/abc123 — sankalp (@dejavucoder) December 20, 2024 But one fine day, they pulled the plug and started rate-limiting. I admit I milked them too much, so I didn't feel bad about this. It's worth asking whether I was doing shenanigans or it was Cursor. cursor shenanigans or my shenanigans? pic.twitter.com/def456 — sankalp (@dejavucoder) December 31, 2024 But post this change, people have been getting rate-limited much faster, and you can only get unlimited usage using the auto-model feature. Speaking for myself, I don't really trust models other than Sonnet 4 and o3. Both are beasts at agentic search and code generation. Using these with API usage pricing can quickly lead to "oh husbant... now we are homeless." I do trust Gemini Pro 2.5 and GPT-4.1 a bit, but I use the former 2 the most. Oh, I forgot to mention Opus 4 can really help solve some bugs on which Sonnet 4 struggles for hours so when I used to get really stuck in Cursor, I would switch on API usage pricing for a short while and solve my issue (or just dump code on the Claude chat platform) one big reason to use cursor apart from the great developer experience was to spend 20 dollars and get 100 dollar worth of API credits value thanks to VC daddies but i am not sure if that would still retain going forward https://t.co/PYderkMs1g — sankalp (@dejavucoder) July 5, 2025 Lately, the requests also started getting a bit slower on Cursor - Sonnet specifically. Maybe this was an Anthropic issue (someone give this company some more GPUs and senior distributed systems engineers to keep their API up). Apart from the above, I was also influenced by many of the tpot peeps like @tokenbender, @thepushkarp, @xeophon_, @menhguin, etc. Tokenbender's blog showed that you can do a lot of power user and multi-agent stuff on the system so that got me hooked too. How I Met Claude Code aka CC This is, kids, How I Met Claude Code. I already had a $20 subscription. I started using Claude Code via the sub; they only provide Sonnet 4, and it was sufficient for me 90% of the time. I installed CC inside Cursor. Cursor's diff reviewing workflow was too convenient, and I couldn't leave this behind. I like to review most of my diffs, unlike certain people who just keep pressing "Accept All"... (Anya Heh Face .jpeg) You can review all the diffs, resolve merge conflicts, and all the nice editor things. Sometimes you just want that pinch of o3 usage or Grok 4 or other new exciting models. Other times you just want to format some stuff because copying with correct formatting still sucks in CC. I had also gotten RLHF'ed by the Cursor notification sound at this point. Sorry, this is turning out to be a Cursor nostalgia post, but I promise the next sections are all about CC. Anyways since Cursor had been limiting so much and I had a lot of coding work (work work and gumroad bounties haha), I decided to try out the 200 USD Claude Max subscription. It's basically unlimited Sonnet 4 and Opus 4 (and it better be) and started experimenting. I think 100 USD plan should be more than enough for most too. Discombubulating… Current Workflow Coming to the workflow, initially I just typed stuff to make changes. I stared at the screen, seeing it slowly find files and perform edits. It took me some time to trust it - 2-3 days despite the model being Sonnet 4. (I was hesitant to switch on Auto Edit mode lol) Once I gained confidence, I started getting more into exploring commands. My effort was to get really good at the basic commands - you need to experiment/explore to even find these. It’s very easy to miss these when you just read stuff. The next few sections are exactly what I mention above - a beginner's guide, apart from me telling my experience so far. My current Claude Code dance is to start fresh, dump my entire problem like I'm talking to a therapist, then switch to Opus if things get spicy (/model Opus → Shift+Tab for planning mode). These days I tell it to scribble notes in claude.md or branch-analysis.md inside the .claude folder - took me 4 days to discover this trick, naturally. The copy-pasting nightmare can be solved to some extent by just making Claude write everything to files first, then copy from there. Tip: Use Shift+Tab extensively; cycle between Plan mode and the auto-edit mode. Get a plan from Opus and do 80-90% of the task with Sonnet 4. It would be faster. The below screenshot is from one of my chats with Pushkar. Flibbertigibbeting… Basic Context Management If you use Claude Code, it will show X% until compaction happens. The moment I see that, I just start a new chat after - telling Claude to note down the important points in a file and then I will just start a new chat. I just intuitively feel it’s better to start a new chat. Sometimes, when I genuinely like a note and I absolutely want some of the context to stay, I do compaction. Otherwise, I don't. Plus it takes quite a few minutes to complete. Many agent frameworks have utilised the “scratchpad” idea. You can tell claude to keep documenting it’s changes in scratchpad. It will document all files and all edits/removals/additions and maybe user notes (you can tell it to). Helps a lot when you come back to branch and start a new session. By the way, you can resume an old session by /resume Resume a conversation option. I found this after 1 week of usage 😭. Below screenshot from token’s blog. Transmuting…. Why Sonnet Feels Better in CC Than in Cursor? I posted this the day I started using claude code haha and the algo kinda picked it up. There are bunch of good replies btw. why sonnet feels better in claude code than in cursor? pic.twitter.com/ghi789 — sankalp (@dejavucoder) January 6, 2025 The gist was Claude Code is likely post-trained with the same tools that it currently uses. It’s just more comfortable in the current harness. Now that I have experienced using it too, I can say the the “tool call” selection that they have implemented contributes to this. I think it manages context better too - Cursor might be compressing or making some optimisations to the context (speculation) while Claude can just read lines in a vanilla way. I also feel CC might be using tokens more efficiently. By the way these days, I have started using CC more in just a standalone terminal instead of Cursor because latter is buggy. Smooshing… Claude Subagents When you see this Cute Todo list - it’s Claude subagents at play. How these are spawned, I don’t know the details but this is partly responsible for better context management. Reticulating… Searching Cursor allowed models to do normal searches and semantic search. If I am not wrong, agentic search is just letting the model explore the codebase by itself and giving it freedom to use tools like grep, ripgrep. Cursor allows for a semantic search tool call. I think overall, Cursor search is much faster… Maybe I will try MorphLLM’s retrieval tool to try semantic search with CC. Coming to CC, the search to be pretty slow (can be mitigated by above context mgmt techniques above). But the thing is you can use subagents. You can do a lot of searches in a big codebase, then you can tell Claude to use sub-agents in parallel. It has this task tool which runs in a multi-threaded way. It will deploy several agents - these agents are like Haiku-based or Sonnet which I don't know but if they just have to do grep tool calls, then I think even Haiku is fine. Below is a screenshot from Anthropic’s official blogpost claude-code-best-practices. It’s done by the “Task tool”. Key tips from above SS are to use subagents and use /think /think hard /ultrathink Know Your Commands I wondered for a while how can I just use bash mode without switching to a different terminal. Then I had a look at shortcuts Shift + ? . You can just do ! . I got to know about this after like a week of usage lmao. It can run one off commands, but I think it cannot run a Python interactive shell like you can do in a normal terminal. Again, I love the colors. By the way it's possible to run claude in headless mode using claude -p "search the internet and tell me about anthropic" since it's a proper CLI tool. Moving ahead... this is gonna sound dumb, but I didn't know you can @ files in Claude Code for like 3-4 days of usage. @Josh9817 told me eventually. Had I checked shortcuts before, I would have realized this. Another feature is memorize. I haven't used this a lot so far, but it's like adding custom instructions to system prompt. It will use these across sessions. How Claude looks up memories Claude Code reads memories recursively: starting in the cwd, Claude Code recurses up to (but not including) the root directory / and reads any CLAUDE.md or CLAUDE.local.md files it finds. This is especially convenient when working in large repositories where you run Claude Code in foo/bar/, and have memories in both foo/CLAUDE.md and foo/bar/CLAUDE.md. Claude will also discover CLAUDE.md nested in subtrees under your current working directory. Instead of loading them at launch, they are only included when Claude reads files in those subtrees. Love the colors! Musing… Sonnet vs Opus Notes Sonnet does the job 90% of the time, infact it scores a few points above Opus 4 in SWE-bench. It's very good at Python and like any type of front-end slop. Sonnet >> Opus when things get long context plus it’s more agentic and faster. I've noticed that Opus tends to get confused after a few turns of instructions. How I solve this → In these scenarios, I usually tell it to dump stuff in some file inside the. Claude folder and then I start a new conversation. If it is some difficult bug, I will start with Opus. Otherwise, I just start with Sonnet. If you have provided all the relevant context to Sonnet, then most of the time Sonnet does the job. Opus does well when Sonnet gets stuck - start a new window and spam Opus. Towards Custom Commands /pr-comments and /review are available by default but they reflect what a custom command can be like. You need to have github CLI installed for these. Let’s say I made some changes on a branch, and now I want to restart the conversation. In this case, there are two options: You can use the review function to get it to review the diff There's also a command to fetch the PR comments I can mention in some file the people whose comments are relevant, and we skip other bots and stuff. Another thing you can do is just tell it "we want to start a new session" and then we will see the diff via the review PR. This would take more steps but it would have more context. A simpler way would be to just tell it "hey please check the diff from main" (this is like a substitute for the cursor diff from main branch feature which also I loved as an experience) Miscellaneous Command Tips Press Esc twice fast and you can fork from anywhere in the conversation! you can do / permissions to adjust permissions before a session Use claude --dangerously-skip-permissions if you are feeling brave I loved this video: Things I Would Like to Try Next I would like to try defining some custom commands and using them similarly I I would like to try some MCP servers, like Playwright server, to automate frontend development. We need to focus on creating feedback loops for Claude so it can take a screenshot, see the screenshot, and then iterate on the UI. All the stuff mentioned in this how-i-bring-the-best-out-of-claude-code-part-2 I want to try some prompt optimization. This has been on my to-do list, as I have couple of tasks at work around this. I think how this will go like - first I would have to identify the criteria against which I will judge the prompt. Something stupid / easy to begin with and evolve it on the go. I can have it in one file rubric.md. Then I can have a couple of files having the context that might go into my prompt.md. prompt.md stores the prompt ofc. Then we run claude using prompt, pass the output to another claude instance for the judge, ask one claude instance to find shortcomings and then subsequently update the prompt. This can be like a single claude instance loop or a multi-agent system. (Inspired by Nirant's posts) Multi-agent systems where I use multiple CC instances and allow them to talk to each other using an action log Conclusion I consider Cursor a power use tool too and it's UI/UX is super polished. However Claude Code is one step further in terms of the power usage (but obviously behind UI/UX and a steeper learning curve) Overall I feel due to the CLI based nature of Claude Code, it urges the user to do more exploration. I think because of lack of visual UI cues, it encourages exploration. A lot of stuff is hidden and you need to find it. It rewards you for curiosity. It might feel better for this reason for the nerds and power users. Feature Requests A possible UI integration ( Can checkout Claudia but it’s a matter of time they make it too) Checkpointing like the one we have in Cursor. I know Git exists but still Cursor checkpointing is too convenient. Better copy-pasting 😭 Allow to use other models (Ok, they won’t give this) If you made it this far, thanks for reading! Hope you learnt something new. great blog post about claude code experience https://t.co/jkl012 — tbpn (@tbpn) January 13, 2025