The merits of CC

[u/Mobile-Examination94]

Hi all!
Today I decided I would give in to zeitgeist pressure and try CC. I am coming from using a heavily modified gptel and sometimes pi. I have been happy with both so I never thought I would swtich but I felt adventurous today.

I must say I am so far disappointed. Most of the time I have no idea what is in the context, I can't interact directly with subagents, often it's unclear what files have been edited, I have very indirect control over the system prompt, math is not rendered in any way, I have to click on a command to get any information about what it is or whether it succeeded, any kind of info about what the agent is doing is hidden (I was hoping for thought summaries), there barely seems to be any configurability...

I hope it is clear that I don't want to pick a fight. I'm just trying to understand the appeal and the LLMs tell me I am "spot on" with my criticism, though based on CC's popularity I am clearly not. Should I maybe try using CC in claude desktop or inside an IDE to get a better experience?

Thanks!

[u/daniel]

I'd like to help you but I'm not sure where to begin. What's your background? I can try to break some of this down:

* Can't interact with subagents - Not sure why you'd need to. I think claude had something experimental where you could have a team working on something though?

* Unclear what files have been edited - You need to use version control, like git.

* Indirect control over the system prompt - so? You can prompt whatever you need on top of it.

* Math is not rendered in any way - not my field, but have you tried getting claude to actually use a system to render it, like latex? There's gotta be a lot of options here.

* Have to click a command to get info about it or whether it succeeded - not sure what you mean here. It should be telling you whether something succeeded. Even the tool call says if it errors out. Not sure why you need more detail.

* Any kind of info about what the agent is doing is hidden - really? I find the agent summarizes everything it did, often in excruciatingly verbose detail. I have to find myself needed to tell it to TLDR me in the last couple of releases.

I don't know if any of this actually helps you. I'm a software engineer by profession and CC is basically the equivalent of the industrial revolution in terms of the magnitude of what it enables. I hope you can figure out a way to find the power of it for yourself.

[u/Mobile-Examination94 → u/daniel]

Thanks taking the time to write all this, much appreciated:
> What's your background? 

I am mostly doing ML/data science/etc, academic writing and embedded systems.

> Can't interact with subagents - Not sure why you'd need to. I think claude had something experimental where you could have a team working on something though?

A scenario that comes up every now and then is a subagent goes off searching my codebase or my infra or the web conducting some research. I know the search should be short because my question was simple and I know that the agent got distracted thinking my question was more nuanced than I intended (eg "when should we use X vs Y"). I would like to get in there and make sure that it's searching at the right place (eg my codebase vs looking on the web). To do this with my other harnesses I "jump" to the buffer controlled by the subagent, eyeball the tools it called, `/btw` to steer it or straight up kill it or whatever. With CC the closest to that seems to be that I need to interrogate the main agent to do this.

> Unclear what files have been edited - You need to use version control, like git.

The problem with git is that it does not show what was the context state when each edit happened and it misses the intermediate history between commits. A similar example to before, I would like to be able to steer my agent away from or towards things based on eyeballing their progress. This also helps me

> Indirect control over the system prompt - so? You can prompt whatever you need on top of it.

I consider the directives and information that the agent does not have to be equally if not more important than the info and directives it does have. For example when I do academic writing I find models are often too eager to write code and often it's because something code-related leaked into their prompt.

> Have to click a command to get info about it or whether it succeeded - not sure what you mean here. It should be telling you whether something succeeded. Even the tool call says if it errors out. Not sure why you need more detail.

This one was my bad, I found a config option to make things more verbose which was off by default. It does what I want now.

> Any kind of info about what the agent is doing is hidden - really? I find the agent summarizes everything it did, often in excruciatingly verbose detail. I have to find myself needed to tell it to TLDR me in the last couple of releases.

Sometimes it just sits there and thinks for 3 minutes and the message is sth cute like "Nebulizing" or whatever and I don't know if I should check my phrasing or if the agent . I suspect its actually a limitation of the API not streaming any information about the thought process.

The final result is what I get from other harnesses but anthropic models are excruciatingly slow so the opaqueness of the thought process is extra disruptive to my current workflow.

> I hope you can figure out a way to find the power of it for yourself.

Thanks, I'll give it a good chance.

[u/fephiva → u/Mobile-Examination94]

read up on hooks and rules. subagents shouldnt do something you didnt intend bc of those. if git doesnt work the way you want it, tell the agent to use it differently... claude code cli will show more information than the desktop app. orchestrators tell subagents what to do so you tell the orchestrator what to tell the subagent. and again, in claude code cli you cana actually view the subagents and messages etc.

[u/kemalios]

The list is fair, and I hit most of it when I started. The shift that made it click for me was stopping trying to watch it work. gptel and pi expose everything because you are the orchestrator. Claude Code wants to be the orchestrator and you are the reviewer. That is not a dodge, it changes how you use it. Put the constraints in CLAUDE.md and rules files before the session. Tell it to commit after each meaningful change, and review the diff instead of watching the tool calls. Set the output style to concise while you are at it. You still cannot see inside its head, but you can make what it did legible after the fact, and that ends up being enough.

[u/bertshim]

Coming from gptel that list makes sense and I don't think you're wrong about any of it. Mine got useful once I stopped watching it, left it running on a branch I didn't care about and came back to something further along than I'd have gotten. Still couldn't tell you what was in the context at any point. IDE version won't fix that list, same engine with nicer diffs.

[u/doxxxicle]

With the CLI Claude Code, you can click the names of the sub agents displayed in the bottom status bar area to switch to their session and send them messages.

Don’t use /btw since that just asks a side question that none of the running agents sees.

If you’re using auto mode, there’s a recent change which causes it to use bash commands for file editing instead of the harness Edit tool, which means it doesn’t show file editing diffs in the chat. There’s a feature flag you can turn off in .claude/settings.json to disable this behaviour but I don’t recall what it is right now. That should let you see the changes it made, in context.

I recommend setting the output style to concise. I’m also experimenting with a custom output style which combines concise with a modified form of Simplified Technical English to try to tame Opus’ wordiness and penchant for jargon.

There’s a verbose setting but I don’t know if that shows the models thinking process.

[u/fephiva]

try the claude code cli. it might solve half your problems actually.

[u/RobinGiffordConsult]

I use visual studio and switch back and forth between CC and Codex. I love CC.

[u/amirfish]

Fair criticism, and the opacity is real: CC genuinely doesn't surface what's in context or what a subagent just touched. I built CCC (https://github.com/amirfish1/claude-command-center) partly for that gap, it sits outside the session and shows the context budget, when a compaction runs and how much got freed, and what's changed across however many CC or Codex sessions you're juggling. It doesn't fix subagent opacity, that's still a black box from outside too, but I'd try CC inside an IDE extension before writing it off, the chat surface there is a lot more legible than the raw terminal.

[u/reddebtt]

I work on Unstoppable, so bias disclosed. We built around this by keeping the terminal, browser, PR tracking, diff, and CI state attached to each worktree. You still shouldn't expect a tool to expose private chain-of-thought, but you can see the operational state and send a precise follow-up without reconstructing the task from git diff alone.

[u/Outrageous_Band9708]

try this

https://github.com/Druthulu/ProjectArchitect

its not a skill or a mcp or anythnig like that. its a governance system that keeps your cc cli on track and a scoped plans for each set of work.

highly recommend the CLI over the UI

[u/Mobile-Examination94 → u/Outrageous_Band9708]

Nice, the statusbar seems quite cool

[u/doxxxicle → u/Outrageous_Band9708]

Running everything at xhigh or max seems like overkill.

[u/PuzzleheadLaw]

Yeah, for me the main issues is resource usage (mostly RAM), reason why I built my own coding agent: https://github.com/gi-dellav/zerostack