Claude Code is doing rounds right now. I picked up a personal project from a year ago (iOS app, not really a mobile eng here), and decided to go the rewrite with some new features to practice some LLM-skills. Honestly, the speed of development is so much faster compared to last year with Claude Code. It definitely helps that I generally know what needs to be done, so I can specify technicalities. And having a good E2E set up works as well.

But yeah, if Gemini with more context comes with a similar product, it could compete and win the developers.

+1 for Claude Code. I'm in the exact same boat - several personal projects with something of a backlog in each, that would've taken me maybe a weekend each to get done manually. Sat down with Claude Code a few days ago and hammered all of it out in an afternoon, it's very impressive. Not perfect, and as you say, having a good idea of what we're doing and how helps a great deal vs. figuring everything out from scratch. And having good tests and/or a stable test environment and processes running.

Another bonus for Claude Code: with the max plans, you don't have to worry about per-token costs. Sometimes a certain attempt does not pan out, but I don't have to feel bad because it didn't cost me hundreds of dollars for it to run a few hours.

Any concrete examples? Which one do you use?

I'm glad you asked (to be honest that was half the reason I posted the comment)

I use Clai[1] which I've written myself, so it fits my workflow the best. But I know llm [2] is a popular choice as well.

With both of these it's possible to have a 'vendor agnostic' version of both claude code and gemini CLI. Better yet: it's possible to very easily swap to the latest and greatest vendor by simply specifying their latest fancy new model.

[1]: https://github.com/baalimago/clai [2]: https://github.com/simonw/llm

60 requests per minute, 1000 requests per day out of the box.