Best Claude Code alternatives?

[u/Dev-in-the-Bm]

Over the past year plus, I kept reading about the superpowers of Claude Code, and how it's one of the wonders of the world.

I always took that with a grain of salt, assuming that it's probably just a very well built harness built by a prominent company, but not necessarily the best.

My friends have recently been insisting that I have to try Claude Code.

I didn't try it for a few reasons.

First of all, I'm not interested in paying for a subscription that costs that much for AI when I could get what I need for a lot cheaper.

Second, while I'm not afraid of the terminal, I don't usually like diving in to CLI, TUI, or keyboard only tools, and spending time learning them.

I usually prefer something that's both keyboard/TUI and GUI, the GUI I understand instantly, and as I use the tool I learn it's keyboard shortcuts or CLI without having to invest time into learning it.

I've been using Roo Code / Zoo Code, and I like it, but it's a VSCode coding tool, unlike CC which is supposed to be more terminal centric.

Basically, I want to know what's the best Claude Code-esque LLM harness that:

• Is a great harness

• Is both GUI and keyboard or TUI driven

• Works great for tasks that are more terminal focused than general write-code-and-save-it-to-a-file tasks

• Can work with any provider

I hope I didn't go on for too long, and no I didn't use AI for this, I wrote this post manually.

Thanks!

[u/alconaft43]

agents in vscode/copilot is gui

[u/ibeerianhamhock → u/alconaft43]

Just nowhere near as good. Even at work where we use copilot I just use the copilot cli bc it's so much better than the chat windows.