Just the fact that it’s not a VSCode fork or extension already makes it superior, but there is more: It is general purpose, you can ask it to do pretty much whatever you want, not limited to coding. It does not have autocompletion, which I believe only gets in the way (suggestions interfere with your own thinking).
I can have cline control and terminal command, it's by no means limited to editing code. On the flip side, if you do edit codey it can lean in the LSP and various other IDE diagnostics to produce better code more efficiently.
Claude Code is pretty great, but I find Cline better (plus I can use Gemini 2.5 with it and am not limited to Anthropic only).
Maybe Cline isn’t inherently limited to coding, but you still have to open VSCode. Whereas I often use Claude Code for things that have nothing to do with text editing, for example dealing with ffmpeg.
Well, that might be alright for Typescript, less so for Python. Of course, Claude Code can run the linters and type checkers manually, the IDE just does it without the extra LLM call.
If it’s alright for typescript then it’s also alright for python because running tsc is equivalent to running whatever python type checker you use, but yes, there may be some overhead because Claude Code has to decide to run your compiler/type checker.
I think you’re referring to that time when you’re writing boilerplate and your LLM is able to guess what you want to write, and it does feel good, yes, but my point is that autocomplete can steer you away from writing unique, original and potentially better code than what it suggests.
It's also good when you're making the "same" change in a bunch of different places, after you do it by hand a couple of times it gets the idea and you can just keep pressing Tab.
