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Field notes from the AI frontier

Why I switched from Claude CLI to Claude Code for Desktop

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While I used to think of myself as someone with deeply rooted habits in my work setup, after years of daily practice and tiny over-optimizations, it’s funny how I completely switched my work setup twice this year: in January and in September.

VS Code had been my daily work companion for years, first as a data scientist before the AI era, then when I discovered the power of Copilot completions, and later with more advanced AI agents. Until late 2025, I was still using agents like Claude or Gemini within the IDE, either in the dedicated Agents panel or in the integrated terminal. Up to that point, I wasn’t confident enough in AI-made code changes to trust them blindly: I had to check each change and work inside the files.

In January 2026, like many of us, I literally saw the light with Claude Code in its CLI version. Within a week, I drastically cut my use of VS Code down to basically reviewing code changes before pushing to GitHub. I’d almost say I reduced it to the Source Control tab.

Now, in September, I made another 180° turn in how I work, overnight. I had read a couple of tweets saying, basically, that working in the terminal felt outdated compared to OpenClaw or similar GUI apps. Being a minimalist, I didn’t try a third-party app, but I gave Claude Code for Desktop another try. An hour later, I had stopped using the CLI completely. While I remember it as buggy and slow at launch, it’s now a much more mature product, which I find better suited to a “modern” way of coding, i.e. constantly switching between many projects, folders and agents.

Here are the main reasons I now use it for almost 100% of my work:

  1. It’s much easier to get an overview of all my projects, with groups in the left sidebar, instead of opening and switching tabs in the terminal. You can see all past and current conversations, and archive or delete them in one click, instead of having to reopen them in a new terminal tab.
  2. The right sidebar has integrated panels that are very convenient:
    • a diff view of all modified files (committed or not), which finally removes the need to keep VS Code open all the time
    • an integrated browser, which Claude uses to verify its work or browse web resources
    • a file navigator, which saves me from frequently switching to a Finder window
  3. Seeing my 5-hour and weekly usage right in each conversation is very convenient. I used to go to Brave every 30 minutes or so and refresh a tab to check my current usage.
  4. Lastly, switching easily between the Code and Chat modes is nice.

The main thing I miss for now is a way to easily move a cloud-based Code session to my local machine, without having to run a tedious /teleport command, open it in the terminal (!) and then reopen it in Claude for Desktop.

But overall, it has really increased my productivity and my ability to work on several streams in parallel without getting lost among terminal tabs.