> it's not cost effective to develop without a Sub vs on API pay-as-you-go, so i do no know why you would

My spend is lower, so I conclude otherwise

> I think the issue with cli tools for many is...

Came from that world, vim, nvim, my dev box is remote, homelab

The issue is not that it is a CLI, it's that you are trying to develop software through the limited portal of a CLI. How do you look at multiple files at the same time? How do you scroll through that file

1. You cannot through a tool like gemini-cli

2. You are using another tool to look at files / diffs

3. You aren't looking at the code and vibe coding your way to future regret

> or me any sort of a GUI slows me down so much it's not feasible.

vim is a "gui" (tui), vs code has keyboard shortcuts, associating GUI with mouse work

> Having put approaching thousands of hours working with LLM coding tools so far, for me claude-code is the best, gemini is very close and might have a better interface, and codex is unusable and fights me the whole time.

Anecdotal "vibe" opinions are not useful. We need to do some real evals because people are telling stories like they do about their stock wins, i.e. they don't tell you about the losses.

Thousands of hours sounds like your into the vibe coding / churning / outsourcing paradigm. There are better ways to leverage these tools. Also, if you have 1000+ hours of LLM time, how have you not gone below the prepackaged experience Big AI is selling you?