Claude on Zed IDE vs Gemini on Android Studio

I thought it was pretty cool to leverage unique dev environments with Nix direnv so I could code remotely via any SSH connection.

But I found something even cooler: I could mount that entire setup into a more GUI & user-friendly interface via Zed IDE’s ‘Open Remote…’ feature, which improved connection stability and kept Zed’s ‘super fast and responsive’ feel. Even when opening a terminal, the whole Nix direnv environment was automatically activated.

“YAY! Awesome ninja-coded software, here we go!”

Until it so happened that “AI RULES AND CODING IS DEAD” rhetoric started dominating the world of LinkedIn and other social platforms.

While I’ve vibe-coded with aggressive agents before, I’ve also done ChatGPT copy-and-paste flows. Agents had a habit of drifting from my intended strategy, forcing me to unnecessarily recalibrate the solution in my head whenever the generated code failed to align with the roadmap I had in mind. ie, it can often change more than it solves, leading to a dead end or debugging nightmare.

I may still be wrong about that, since I’m soon to delve into the practice of defining AI agent mandates through planting specification documentation into the AI context. However, I’m currently not giving agents the responsibility of architecting solutions which require nuance and elegance. I can do that, and it’s actually the fun ‘solve the puzzle’ part of programming :)

So, I haven’t really seen AI as a developer killer yet - until I paid for access to the Claude Sonnet 4.5 API key.

I was floored. I imagined my consciousness was floating out of my body and behind myself into an experience where I was standing behind the most competent coder I’ve ever seen as we talked through and executed a coding solution. I’m making suggestions, and they are getting done, and I’m not even on the keyboard. The pace is hitting the sweet spot, and I’m following along with everything that’s happening, occasionally rejecting some changes and trying again.

“Heck,” I thought. “It seems I have a new employee”. I knew this was only the start - I’ll have teams of these guys in no time.

I tried replicating this experience in Android Studio while working on a native module that deals with efficient video modification & preparation. They have Gemini.

I have to say the experience was not at that level. Gemini felt short-sighted. When I had it modify a sliver in one file, it didn’t account for the consequences in other files. In no time, I had a project that Gemini thought was correct, and couldn’t be built into the front-end (Expo dev) build.

ChatGPT provided better insights into debugging output, but it was much less effective than the front-end project that has Claude on its side. The problem was that the ‘new module’ boilerplate created by a past Expo version had Typescript syntax issues that the new Expo version didn’t like.

My jaw dropped when the solution began to unfold. Claude knew I had access to the native module’s repo, given it was under the same Git organisation, so it asked if it could help fix the module directly. I said sure, and we began working through it step by step. It pulled the repo into a temp folder and started tweaking the Android code and its Typescript adapters.

It then pushed changes to the remote dev branch so that my front-end project could pull it in from remote (as it normally did) during the build. Then it would execute my build scripts, read the resulting build errors, and continue doing some more tweaks to the mobile project.

A few iterations of this, and it finally built again. This process costs only a few USD in API usage. The sheer speed and low cost make me believe we can now throw money at these problems, because watching AI run through try-and-fail loops is much faster and cheaper than watching devs do the same.

I’ll be writing much less code now. I’ll be peer-programming with AI to complete the bulk and tedious tasks, while tweaking the critical business logic that distinguishes my product.

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#AI   #Zed IDE   #Claude   #Sonnet 4.5   #AI Tooling   #Gemini