My best Claude Code tips pt 3

Steve (Builder.io) • 2:57 minutes • Published 2025-07-13 • YouTube

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Why I’m Betting on Anthropic’s Cloud Code for AI-Powered Coding Assistance

In the rapidly evolving world of AI-powered coding tools, choosing the right platform can significantly impact your productivity and costs. Recently, I’ve been exploring two prominent players: Cursor and Anthropic’s Cloud Code. After hands-on experience, I’m confident that Anthropic’s Cloud Code offers unparalleled advantages, especially for developers seeking smart, efficient, and cost-effective AI assistance.

The Core Difference: General-Purpose vs. Specialized AI Models

Cursor built a product designed as a general-purpose agent that supports a variety of AI models. To achieve this, Cursor manages multiple layers of complexity, including training custom models and integrating diverse systems. However, Cursor doesn’t control the core AI models themselves, which adds complexity and additional costs to their offering.

Anthropic, on the other hand, takes a different approach. They focus exclusively on their own AI models, which are renowned as some of the best coding models available. By developing Cloud Code to work seamlessly with their proprietary models, Anthropic ensures deep integration, superior performance, and continuous improvement of both the models and the product.

Why This Matters: Performance and Pricing

Because Anthropic controls both the AI models and the product, they can optimize everything end-to-end. When Cloud Code encounters challenges, the team improves the models directly, leading to faster iteration cycles and higher quality outcomes.

This integration also allows Anthropic to offer the best value. Since they only have to cover their own costs without managing third-party models or building extra layers like Cursor, Cloud Code can be priced more competitively. This means you get maximum access to powerful AI models like Anthropic’s Opus at a lower cost compared to Cursor.

The Value Proposition: Max Mode Pricing Is a Steal

Speaking of pricing, I currently pay for Cloud Code’s Max Mode, and it’s an absolute bargain. If you think about it, having a shockingly intelligent coding assistant available 24/7 for $100 a month beats hiring even the most affordable human engineer by an order of magnitude. The productivity gains and time saved alone justify the cost many times over.

If you’re struggling to justify this expense, consider the hourly rates of human developers worldwide and the potential boost in output and quality that Cloud Code delivers.

A Game-Changing Feature: Queuing for Seamless Workflow

One feature I absolutely swear by in Cloud Code is its queuing system. Previously, with Cursor, I had to manually input each prompt, wait for the response, then enter the next one—often leaving the agent idle while I handled other tasks. This was inefficient and disrupted my workflow.

Cloud Code changes that by allowing you to queue multiple prompts in advance. For example, if you’re working on adding comments to your JSX code and suddenly think of another improvement, you simply add it to the queue. The system intelligently determines when to process each message—waiting for your input if needed and running tasks automatically when appropriate.

This means you can set up a backlog of requests and go about your day, returning later to find a significant amount of work already completed. Just remember to check in periodically, as some tasks might require your feedback.

Final Thoughts

Anthropic’s Cloud Code represents a smart, integrated approach to AI coding assistance with clear advantages over more fragmented solutions like Cursor. By owning their models and focusing on specialized optimization, they deliver superior performance at a better price point. Features like intelligent queuing further elevate the user experience, making Cloud Code not just a tool but a reliable coding partner.

Given the incredible results I’ve seen so far, I’m confidently investing my time and money in Anthropic’s Cloud Code. If you’re a developer looking to amplify your coding efficiency without breaking the bank, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Have you tried AI coding assistants? What’s your experience been like? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

📝 Transcript (94 entries):

If you think about it, cursor built a product that has a general purpose agent intended to support a variety of models. In order to do this, you have a whole additional team involved. They trained custom models as well. And there's just more layers and requirements and things going on here. As well as cursor doesn't build or control the core models that do the core AI. Compare that to anthropic.

They definitively make the best coding models. And so they make cloud code the best at using the model. And when they hit challenges with cloud code, they go and make the model better. They only care about supporting their model. They know everything about how the model works, how it's trained, and how to use it in depth. And they continue to train the model to work well with what they need for cloud code. It also means that Enthropic can give you the most possible value for the least possible price because you only have to worry about paying them. So they can compete on giving you maximum access to models like opus without situations like cursor has where cursor has to make money too. So cursor needs to make a margin ananthropic which fundamentally means you need to pay some degree more with cursor or they need to lose more money which isn't sustainable. So I commend the anthropic team for making such a good tool with cloud code because they can give you the maximum performance at the lowest price directly from the experts and make their models and products better altogether. It's really smart and it's where I am betting my time and money right now today given the incredible results I've been seeing. Now speaking of pricing, I pay for the max mode. Now, if you're used to Cloud Code, previously being based on API pricing, Cloud Code now supports the standard pricing plans. Max mode, in my opinion, is an absolute steal. If you feel like a shockingly intelligent coder working for you 24/7 is not worth $100 a month, you need to look hard at what a human costs per hour for engineering, regardless of where you look in the world. And it's orders of magnitude more than that. So if you're having trouble justifying it for yourself or from your work, always remember the gains this has given you compared to actual manual human work.

One other feature of cloud code that I absolutely swear by is queuing. So we could type a message say add more comments. This is a thread about adding comments to some code. And often I think about oh the next thing I want to do.

What I used to do is create a notepad and start drafting other prompts that I want to do. And then when I see one is done I'll go and paste the next one and enter. That's what I did with the cursor, which is really annoying because again, I'll usually go about my day and answer Slack messages, answer email, do something else, and come back and see the agent's been idle for who knows how long, type the next prompt, go away.

That was not very time efficient. But now with Claude, you can just cue more messages. So if I think of another one, actually also add comments to the main chunks of the JSX, I can cue them into the computed values. And what's great is Cloud is really smart about knowing when it should actually run those things. If it needs feedback from you, it's not going to automatically run the cued messages. It's a pretty smart system, but when it's wrapped up something, it will start addressing them when it makes sense. So, you could queue up a lot, go about your day, and in a lot of cases, just come back to a ton of work done in a good and smart way. But again, check it from time to time because I might need your input.

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