# Coding Lessons Learned Key insights and strategies for development and technical work. ## Claude Code **Set up subagents for specialized tasks** - Create agents with specific roles to make coding more efficient and focused. **Use Sonnet model by default** - Access with `/model` command and use for most tasks to avoid hitting Opus limits quickly on the $100 plan. **Reserve Opus for heavy workloads** - Only switch to Opus for complex, resource-intensive coding tasks. **$200 plan worth it for heavy coding** - Provides about an hour of coding time, valuable for intensive development work. **Efficiency comes with practice** - You'll hit limits less frequently as you become more efficient with the tool. ## Gemini Code **Coding quality has degraded** - Performance for coding tasks has decreased compared to Claude, especially for complex development work. **Still excellent for writing and thinking** - Maintains strong capabilities for content creation and conceptual work. **Use for non-coding technical tasks** - Better suited for documentation, planning, and analysis rather than direct code generation. ## Cursor **Set up Cursor rules properly** - Use `.cursorrules` files (also known as .dc files) to configure project-specific behavior. **Check your system prompts** - Bad outputs often result from poorly configured system prompts in settings. **Clean settings prevent issues** - Ensure nothing in Cursor settings gets configured incorrectly, as this causes most output problems. **Fix settings for better results** - Once system prompts and configuration are corrected, output quality improves significantly. --- *Last Updated: 2025-07-30*