Not long ago someone recommended I try Claude Code for writing code. And honestly, it's been great. It's taken so much of the repetitive grunt work off my plate that I keep wondering why something like this wasn't built sooner. The issue is it absolutely hammers my computer. Sometimes I'm waiting so long for it to write a chunk of code that I've got time to grab an extra coffee and have a smoke. So I got to thinking, maybe there's something else out there that handles coding tasks just as well but runs a lot faster. Claude's basically a whole suite of neural networks, but all I really need is something that's good with code, that's it.

The lag tends to happen when it's not just the model running but everything else wrapped around it. A lot of these tools stack dependencies that quietly eat up memory and CPU while you're waiting on output. Cursor's worth checking out if you haven't already, it handles code pretty well and doesn't put nearly as much strain on the machine.

There's a reason some of these tools drag machines down, and it's not always the AI doing the heavy lifting. A lot of the real weight comes from the runtime environment and everything bundled on top of it. Worth trying Gopher Code https://github.com/projectbarks/gopher-code . It takes Claude Code as the base but strips out a lot of the overhead, Node.js included, which is typically what hammers the CPU the hardest. On lighter hardware the difference is pretty noticeable.