Six months ago I moved from Cursor to Claude Code as the primary IDE for client builds. Not because Cursor stopped working — it didn't. Because I wanted to test a hypothesis: that a CLI-first agent with full repo context plus real shell access would change the velocity of solo client work more than another autocomplete-in-the-editor would.
Six months later, the hypothesis held. Not in the way I expected.
What got faster: anything that touches multiple files. Refactoring a CTA component across six pages used to be a multi-tab dance. Now it's one prompt and a diff review. Migration scripts — the kind that walk a content folder and rewrite all the frontmatter — went from "I'll do that this weekend" to a 90-second job. Greenfield scaffolding (a new Next.js route + page + metadata + schema + test) went from an hour to under ten minutes.
What got harder: design judgment calls. Claude is a competent engineer but a mediocre art director. Anything that requires "does this hierarchy feel right" still goes through my eyes first, and the answer is usually "close, but no." Six months in I've stopped asking it to produce final design — I use it to produce the structural skeleton and then I do the visual pass by hand.
Three categories where it still doesn't help much: (1) Anything that requires reading a third-party dashboard — GSC, Vercel, GHL — where the truth lives behind a login and outside the repo. (2) Anything that requires negotiating with a stakeholder, including the kind of negotiation where the answer is "no, we should not build this." (3) Anything where the right call is to delete code instead of write it — Claude defaults toward addition, and I have to actively prompt it toward subtraction.
The cost trajectory has been the surprise. Six months in, my monthly Claude bill is bigger than my Vercel bill and roughly equal to my Hostinger VPS bill across nine client accounts. The math still works because the per-hour leverage is higher than any other tool I pay for — but the days of "Claude Code is basically free" are over.
If you're a solo operator on the fence about switching, the honest answer is: switch, keep your old IDE installed for the three categories above, and accept that the bill is now a real line item. The leverage is real. The cost is real. They're both real because they're both the same thing.
