A developer friend of mine would not stop talking about Claude Code. He said it changed how he works. I was skeptical — developers get excited about new tools every week. Most of them fade.
But he sent me a screenshot of his terminal. He had asked Claude Code to refactor a complex function, and it had done it in under a minute. He said the same task would have taken him 30 minutes manually. That got my attention.
I spent a week testing Claude Code. Here is what I found.
What It Is
Claude Code is Anthropic’s coding assistant that runs in your terminal. You describe what you want, and it writes the code, tests it, and makes changes to your files. It is different from Copilot because it operates on your whole project, not just the file you have open.
The Good
For specific, well-defined tasks, Claude Code is incredible. I asked it to add error handling to a Python script. It analyzed the code, identified the edge cases, and implemented proper try-except blocks in about 30 seconds. The code was clean. It even added comments.
It excels at refactoring. I gave it a messy JavaScript file and asked it to modernize the syntax. It converted callbacks to async/await, added proper error handling, and cleaned up the formatting. The result looked like a human had spent an hour on it.
The Bad
Claude Code struggles with ambiguous tasks. When I asked it to improve the performance of a script without specifying how, it made changes that did not help and in one case made things slower. You need to be specific about what you want.
It also has a token limit. For very large files, it cannot process the entire thing at once. I hit this limit on a 2000-line file and had to split my requests into smaller chunks.
Pricing is usage-based. It costs about $0.03 per query for simple tasks and more for complex ones. A heavy day of use could run $5-10.
Is It Worth It?
For professional developers: yes. Especially for refactoring, debugging, and writing boilerplate. The time savings are real.
For casual coders like me: it depends. If you write code regularly and can afford the variable pricing, it pays for itself in time saved. If you code occasionally, Copilot’s flat $10/month pricing is probably a better deal.
I kept both. Copilot for daily work, Claude Code for the tough problems that Copilot cannot solve. The combination covers most of what I need.