My experience has been that Claude Code is exceptional at tool use (and thus working with agentic IDEs) but... not the smartest coder. It will happy re-invent the wheel, create silos, or generate terrible code that you'll only discover weeks or months later. I've had to rollback weeks of code to discover major edge regressions that Claude had introduced.
Now, someone will say 'add more tests'. Sure. But that's a bandaid.
I find that the 'smarter' models like Gemini and o3 output better quality code overall and if you can afford to send them the entire context in a non-agentic way .. then they'll generate something dramatically superior to the agentic code artifacts.
That said, sometimes you just want speed to proof a concept and Claude is exceptional there. Unfortunately, proof of concepts often... become productionized rather than developers taking a step back to "do it right".
I disagree that tests are bandaids. Humans needs tests to avoid doing regressions. If you avoid tests you are giving the AI a much harder task than what human programmers usually have.
Now, someone will say 'add more tests'. Sure. But that's a bandaid.
I find that the 'smarter' models like Gemini and o3 output better quality code overall and if you can afford to send them the entire context in a non-agentic way .. then they'll generate something dramatically superior to the agentic code artifacts.
That said, sometimes you just want speed to proof a concept and Claude is exceptional there. Unfortunately, proof of concepts often... become productionized rather than developers taking a step back to "do it right".