Why I Stopped Using ChatGPT for Code (And What I Use Instead)

I used ChatGPT for code for over a year. It helped. But at some point I noticed I was spending more time re-explaining my codebase than writing code. Here's what changed.

The context window problem

ChatGPT's web interface has no memory of your files. Every conversation starts cold. You paste snippets, explain architecture, give examples — then the context window fills up and you start over. For greenfield scripts: fine. For real projects: painful.

What Claude does differently

Claude has a larger context window and handles long, structured documents better. When I paste a full module, it actually reads it. When I ask it to refactor something, it understands how that function connects to the rest of the file.

More importantly: it reasons through problems. Not just "here's code that matches your pattern" but "here's why that approach will cause issues at scale, and here's an alternative."

Cursor: the IDE that changed my workflow

Cursor is VS Code with an AI that knows your entire codebase. Not just what you paste — all of it. You can ask "why is this function slow?" and it reads the relevant files itself. You can say "refactor this to match the pattern in auth.ts" and it finds auth.ts without you pointing to it.

The Cmd+K inline edit and Cmd+L chat are genuinely different from anything I'd used before.

When to use which tool

• ChatGPT: Quick one-off questions, explaining concepts, brainstorming names
• Claude: Long documents, reasoning through architecture decisions, writing with nuance
• Cursor: Actual coding — anything involving your real codebase
• GitHub Copilot: Autocomplete while you type (pairs well with Cursor)

My current stack

Cursor (editor) + Claude (thinking partner) + Copilot (autocomplete) = genuinely faster shipping.

The tools aren't competing — they're complementary. Once you stop thinking of AI as one monolithic thing and start treating different tools as specialists, the whole workflow clicks.

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