Claude is good at analysis and surgical edits of existing code, in my opinion.
Grok is good for research/as a supplement to traditional web search.
The latest Gemini versions are good at generating large blocks of net-new code, especially when it follows well-defined patterns/is boilerplate.
I would agree, sort of. I'm probably just not using the tools everyone is. I'm not really a fan of the walled garden thing of cursor. I just like my IDEs once I get settled in and I don't think I need to change around that. Most of the work I've been wanting to do is around chat/edits anyway. The inline stuff is only so good so I don't need it.
Since I have pretty large mono-repos, I've been having a hard time with it being context aware of such a large base. I want to be able to do large breadth refactors. Not a lot of code to produce, but lots of little things. Like I changed the style of my function calls, or the way I use pointers, or using a qualifier, or updating all of my CMake files to the latest version etc. The tools I have really struggle with working on that many files at once, and If I did it one at a time I'm still faster doing by hand.
I did just get cline linked up to my own server which is pretty neat, ive been tuning models and playing with new ones. I still need me a 24gb GPU to play with some big-boy models, but ive still been impressed with what I have now.
I just used Cursor to change my codebase to using a framework, which would have taken weeks, by hand. It worked, but now I need about a week to fix everything. Still faster.
Yeah for things claude knows (like popular frameworks with good docs) it seems pretty good, although I've been fighting it converting to Tailwind 4, and another branch converting from vuejs to nuxt. It's pretty bad. If I feed it the half assed docs, and chat with it it seems to be faster than me reading the docs and manually converting but still has a lot of work to do.
With low level stuff it sucks with. A finite state machine in C without using raw char pointers, for example, it can't do it. Can't follow any conventions, makes 500 line spaghetti code with poor naming, not readable, etc. All despite spending way much time tuning it and trying different models.
You invented rewrites
It looks like the solution to this in copilot is agents. I just had it pull all the scss in my component files, rewrite to css, remove the style tags, create a set of stylesheets, clean them up, create directories, make sure tailwind was referenced correctly, then import them. It took like 10 minutes, but wow that was impressive
