I've been loving Claude Code on the web

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Capabilities & Use Cases

  • Many commenters like Claude Code Web for “vibe coding” away from a full dev setup (iPad/phone, couch, travel), quick MVPs, speculative changes, and exploratory work.
  • Typical flows: clone repo → make change → run tests (when tools allow) → push branch/PR; some pair it with automatic review app deployments for instant previews.
  • Git as “memory” plus PRs as a human-review gate is seen as a strong pattern, especially for team workflows and non-developers (marketing, product, students) building small tools.

Environment & Tooling Limitations

  • Lack of devcontainer support and a closed set of languages/tools frustrate some users; installing custom tools can be slow and repeated per interaction.
  • Several people prefer alternatives that give full container/VPS or local environments (Hetzner, Cloudflare containers, custom VPS products, Replit’s NixOS setup) for Docker, docker-compose, Playwright, R, etc.
  • Some want MCP support and a public API so Claude Code Web could orchestrate broader automations.

CLI vs Web & Engineering Quality

  • The CLI is praised for tool use but heavily criticized for bugs: memory leaks, high CPU, infinite loops, context leaks, flashing UI, and a single large JSON store causing severe slowdowns.
  • One view is that Anthropic’s research is strong but engineering and tooling quality lag; others counter that despite flaws, no other agentic coding tool matches Claude Code’s overall usefulness.

GitHub Behavior & UX

  • Concern that Claude Code pushes branches/PRs too eagerly to public repos, exposing speculative work; users want explicit authorization before pushing (Codex is cited as better here).
  • Some note you can configure Claude Code to commit under your own identity and disable “co-authored-by” metadata.

Comparisons: Codex, Gemini, Others

  • Many feel GPT‑5 Codex is more capable and reliable on complex tasks, but slower, costlier, more “robotic,” and prone to over-scoped changes and long one-shot attempts.
  • Claude (Sonnet/Opus) is seen as faster, more conversational, better at narrow edits and tool use, but less consistently correct on hard problems.
  • Gemini is viewed as strong for front-end/design but worse at following global instructions and more prone to confident hallucinations.
  • Some route Claude Code tooling through other models (DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM) or use alternative CLIs (Crush, Qwen CLI, Grok, Replit) to optimize cost and behavior.

Broader Reflections & Education

  • Debate over whether web IDEs/LLM agents make traditional IDEs obsolete; consensus leans toward hybrid workflows and future IDEs becoming LLM frontends.
  • One student asked if they should drop a Data Analytics degree due to AI tools; advice given: finish the degree—core programming and analytics skills still matter and enhance AI-assisted productivity.