I did my own experiment with Claude Code vs Cursor tab completion. The task was to convert an Excel file to a structured format. Nothing fancy at all.

Claude Code took 4 hours, with multiple prompts. At the end, it started to break the previous fixes in favor of new features. The code was spaghetti. There was no way I could fix it myself or steer Claude Code into fixing it the right way. Either it was a dead-end or a dice roll with every prompt.

Then I implemented my own version with Cursor tab completion. It took the same amount of time, 4 hours. The code had a clear object-oriented architecture, with a structure for evolution. Adding a new feature didn't require any prompts at all.

As a result, Claude Code was worse in terms of productivity: the same amount of time, worse quality output, no possibility of (or at best very high cost of) code evolution.

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thesamethrowawa 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Are you able to share your prompts to Claude Code? I assume not, they are probably not saved - but this genuinely surprised me, it seems like exactly the type of task an LLM would excel at (no pun intended!). What model were you using OOI?

	▲	laserlight 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> this genuinely surprised me Me too. After listening to all the claims about Claude Code's productivity benefits, I was surprised to get the result I got. I'm not able to share details of my work. I was using Claude Opus 4.5, if I recall correctly.

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shinycode 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The exact same prompt ? Everything depends on the prompt and it’s different tools. These days the quality and what’s build around the prompt matters as much as the code. We can’t feed generic query.