This is a good point, the CLI kind of forces you to engage with the coding process through the eyes of the agent, rather than just treating it as “advanced autocomplete” in the IDE.
However, there are a lot of Claude Code clones out there now that are basically the same (Gemini CLI, Codex, now Cursor CLI etc.). Claude still seems to lead the pack, I think? Perhaps it’s some combination of better coding performance due to the underlying LLM (usually Sonnet 4) being fine-tuned on the agent tool calls, plus Claude is just a little more mature in terms of configuration options etc.?
I haven't tried codex or cursor-cli yet, but I have tried to give gemini a few tasks and in my experience, compared to claude code, it's not great.
Gemini's been very quick to dive in and start changing things, even when I don't want it to. But those changes almost always fall short of what I'm after. They don't run or they leave failing tests, and when I ask it to fix the tests or the underlying issue, it churns without success. Claude is significantly slower and definitely not right all the time, but it seems to do a better job of stepping through a problem and resolving it well enough, while also improving results when I interject.
However, there are a lot of Claude Code clones out there now that are basically the same (Gemini CLI, Codex, now Cursor CLI etc.). Claude still seems to lead the pack, I think? Perhaps it’s some combination of better coding performance due to the underlying LLM (usually Sonnet 4) being fine-tuned on the agent tool calls, plus Claude is just a little more mature in terms of configuration options etc.?