What's the average programmer? Is it someone who likes CLI tools? Or who likes IDE integration? Different strokes for different folks and surely the average programmer understands what environment they will be most comfortable in.

> Different strokes for different folks and surely the average programmer understands what environment they will be most comfortable in.

That's a silly claim to me, we're talking about a completely new environment where you prompt an AI to develop code, and therefore an "average programmer" is unlikely to have any meaningful experience or intuition with this flow. That is exactly what GP is talking about - where does he plug in the AI? What tradeoffs are there to different options?

The other day I had someone judge me for asking this question by dismissively saying "dont say youve still been using ChatGPT and copy/paste", which made me laugh - I don't use AI at all, so who was he looking down on?

To me that's the silly argument. How many different tools have you ever used? New build system? New linter? How did you know if you wanted to run those on the command line or in your IDE?

And it seems the story you shared sort of proves the point: the web interface worked fine for you and you didn't need to question it until someone was needlessly rude about it.

> How many different tools have you ever used? New build system? New linter? How did you know if you wanted to run those on the command line or in your IDE?

In what way is this analogous? Running scripts is vastly different than AI codemod. I could easily answer how when and why a build system would be plugged in, and linting and formatting are long-established pathways.

On the flipside there are barely even established practices, let alone best ones, for using AI. The point being offered is that AI companies offer shockingly little guidance on how to use their apparently amazing tool.

I personally have never used AI to author code, so I don't really know how the story I provided proves anything to you. I like it to answer questions about why something isn't working to help give me some leads, and it is good at telling you how to use a new framework quickly, but that's a pretty different practice than it authoring code. Seems like you're kinda dodging the question too.

The environment isn't the only difference, it's not "do you prefer CLI or IDE or Web" because they behave differently. Claude Code and Claude web and Claude through Cursor won't give you identical outputs for the same question.

It's not like running a tool in your IDE or CLI where the only difference is the interface. It would be like if gcc ran from your IDE had faster compile times, but gcc run from the CLI gives better optimizations.

The fact that no one is recommending any baseline to start with proves the point that it's confusing. And we haven't even touched on Sonnet v Opus