RooCode: Agentic power, all-or-crawl workflow
RooCode layers an orchestrator (“Boomerang Tasks”) over its Cline legacy, splitting big requests into subtasks you approve one by one. It ships a diff view, but it’s a modal panel, not the inline experience Cursor and Windsurf provide. Roo has only two speeds: Go Fast (hands-off, great for throw-away prototypes) and Crawl (approve every micro-step). There’s no middle-ground “walk” mode, so real-world development feels either too automated or too granular. Config changes don’t always reload without a restart. Roo is also not the tool you want for AI-assisted debugging.
Strengths: Powerful task orchestration, VS Code plugin rather than fork.
Limits: Modal diff view, no balanced workflow speed, sporadic config glitches.
Claude Code: Because I’m too cool for an IDE
If you’re in a Discord channel, chatting with the in crowd, or just lurking, they aren’t talking about any of these tools. They’re talking about CLI tools. Claude Code is fun and does a good job of realizing some Python scripts and things you might want to try. However, as your project gets bigger and debugging becomes a larger part of the test, you’re going to want and IDE. It isn’t that you can’t use one, it’s just then why are you using this thing for generation and changing things instead of a tool that integrates into your IDE?