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Claude Code in Terminal > Claude Code App

Why I Still Prefer to Claude in the Terminal

|2 min read
Agentic AIAI

Claude Code inside the Claude apps really has advanced supremely, especially lately:

  • Remote control
  • Connections to Telegram, other messaging apps
  • Session handoffs from desktop to remote

It’s clear that’s where a ton of work + future improvements have been delivered and will continue to be delivered.

However, I continue to find I prefer to use Claude Code within terminal for a number of reasons:

  • Hooks, I still haven’t found a dependable way to deploy granular hooks that federate out to various events for Claude in all situations (Claude Chat, Claude CoWork, Claude Code, in & outside of apps)
  • JSONL records from chats - difficult to capture / read except
  • Observability - this is especially true when using inside of IDE-based Terminal sessions

and I’ve seen other Devs prefer the same.

Let me go thru these reasons and explain them a bit.

  • Hooks: These allow me to trigger automatic scripts at session start & session end, as well at various other specific points within the agentic developer flow.
  • JSONL Chat Logs: We can examine these locally for semi-automated improvements in our workflows when we examine token burn rates and adjudicate for quality (not just quantity) of outputs proximate to tokens consumed.
  • Observability: I realize I’m in the minority here and most people just yolo within a terminal, but for me I prefer to have my terminal operating within an IDE; I can bring in VSCode plugins for some boots in productivity / reliability + see what files my agents have edited. I can navigate other files / dependencies while my agents are operating inside of terminal sessions