Claude Code was a huge huge huge step up when it came out, absolutely massive.

It was barely marketed. I always turned copilot off, never found any benefit from Cursor. Claude Code was vastly different in conception, function, and capability, a product that defined an entirely new category of product.

Perhaps to others, that found copilot or cursor useful, it was merely marketing. But to me it was function and productivity, that I had never seen before.

People try to dismiss these things as LLM wrappers, but the LLM will be commoditized, and the wrapper will be where the real product design goes and where the real differentiation happens. Owning that unique process of communication between the dev and what the dev wants, figuring out the most stuff with the least complete spec, and maximizing every bit of the very tiny communication channel between the dev and the LLM and the code on disk, that's where 2026 and 2027 will be focused, until the next category defining product is created.