The code that ChatGPT and Claude will output via their chat interfaces is a night and day difference from what will be output from tools built around their APIs.
You "can" get the web UI to behave similarly but it's both tedious and slow to manually copy and paste all of that into your context during each interaction and the output will be unfriendly towards human interaction to paste it back out to your project. But that's like saying you "can" browse the internet with a series of CURL commands and pasting the output into files you save locally and then viewing them locally from your browser, nobody is advised to do that because it's a painfully bad experience compared to just having your browser fetch a site's files directly and rendering them directly.
Just go check out Aider or Cline's project repos and look at the dramatically different amounts of code, repo and task specific context they can automatically inject for you as part of their interface, or how much different the built in system prompts are from whatever the default web UIs use, or even the response structures and outputs and how those are automatically applied to your work instead. I've never once exhausted my daily API limits just treating their APIs as Chat interface backends (via Open WebUI and other chat options), but I exhausted my Claude API token limits _the very first day_ I tried Cline. The volume of information you can easily provide through tooling is impossible to do in the same timeframe by hand.
I give every AI tool a college try and have since the copilot beta.
I’m simply not interested in having these tools type for me. Typing is nowhere near the hardest part of my job and I find it invaluable as a meditative state for building muscle memory for the context of what I’m building.
Taking shortcuts has a cost I’m not willing to pay.
I'm speaking from experience and observation of the past two years of LLM assistants of various kinds that outsourcing code production will atrophy your skills generally and will threaten your contextual understanding of a codebase specifically over the long term.
If that's a risk you're willing to take for the sake of productivity, that can be a reasonable tradeoff depending on your project and career goals.
Your coding skills. If you're a new programmer, I can't emphasize this enough: Typing is good for you. Coding without crutches is necessary at this point in your career and will only become more necessary as you progress in your career. I'm a 25 year veteran professional and there's a reason I insist on writing my own code and not outsourcing that to AI.
Using AI as a rubber duck and conversation partner is great, I strongly suggest that. But you need to do the grunt work otherwise what you're doing will not lodge itself in long term memory.
It's like strength training by planning out macros, exercises, schedules and routines but then letting a robot lift those heavy ass weights, to paraphrase Ronnie Coleman.
I'm not a new programmer. I started as a teen in the 90s. I was a pro for some years, although I have not been for a few years now--I own a small B&M business.
I don't have a desire to become a great programmer, like you might. I want to program to meet real-world goals, not some kind of enlightenment. I don't want my long-term memory filled with the nuts and bolts required for grunt work; I've done plenty of programming grunt work in my life.
I am building custom solutions for my business. LLMs allow me to choose languages I don't know, and I'm certain I can get up and running near-immediately. I've learned over a dozen languages before LLMs came on the scene, and I'm tired of learning new languages, too. Or trying to memorize this syntax or that syntax.
I think your outlook is more emotional than logical.
If you're a businessman then do business, proceed. But from the beginning of this thread, I wasn't concerned with business people whose primary interest is velocity.
You "can" get the web UI to behave similarly but it's both tedious and slow to manually copy and paste all of that into your context during each interaction and the output will be unfriendly towards human interaction to paste it back out to your project. But that's like saying you "can" browse the internet with a series of CURL commands and pasting the output into files you save locally and then viewing them locally from your browser, nobody is advised to do that because it's a painfully bad experience compared to just having your browser fetch a site's files directly and rendering them directly.
Just go check out Aider or Cline's project repos and look at the dramatically different amounts of code, repo and task specific context they can automatically inject for you as part of their interface, or how much different the built in system prompts are from whatever the default web UIs use, or even the response structures and outputs and how those are automatically applied to your work instead. I've never once exhausted my daily API limits just treating their APIs as Chat interface backends (via Open WebUI and other chat options), but I exhausted my Claude API token limits _the very first day_ I tried Cline. The volume of information you can easily provide through tooling is impossible to do in the same timeframe by hand.