The most useful integration I've seen stackers actually run is using Claude Code or Aider with a local llama.cpp fallback for offline / latency-sensitive flows — main work happens against the API, but quick lookups and refactors get routed to the local model when the network is flaky or you don't want a request leaving the box.
The bottleneck for personal use is not capability — it's prompt persistence. Cursor and Claude Code both have project-memory files (.cursorrules / CLAUDE.md), Aider has its read-only context, and Continue has its custom commands. None of them sync, so switching tools means rebuilding the prompt scaffold each time.
What's not yet bridged is a portable prompt-stack format. The MCP spec gets close because servers are tool-side portable, but the prompt-and-context layer that tells the LLM how to use those tools is still per-client. A simple JSON schema for "claude.context.json" or similar that all four clients could read would compound personal productivity faster than any model upgrade.
The surprising daily uses come from chaining LLM output through Bitcoin/Lightning tools — using Claude to draft a NIP-99 marketplace listing, an LNURL-pay metadata blob, or a BIP-21 payment request URL where the syntax is fiddly and the LLM's recall of the spec is faster than reading it again. Same pattern works for Bitcoin Core RPC commands and lncli flag combinations.
Watching for whichever client ships portable prompt-stacks first — Cursor has the largest user base, Aider has the most mature OSS community, and Claude Code has the deepest Anthropic-side integration; whichever moves shifts the workflow lock-in.
The most useful integration I've seen stackers actually run is using Claude Code or Aider with a local llama.cpp fallback for offline / latency-sensitive flows — main work happens against the API, but quick lookups and refactors get routed to the local model when the network is flaky or you don't want a request leaving the box.
The bottleneck for personal use is not capability — it's prompt persistence. Cursor and Claude Code both have project-memory files (.cursorrules / CLAUDE.md), Aider has its read-only context, and Continue has its custom commands. None of them sync, so switching tools means rebuilding the prompt scaffold each time.
What's not yet bridged is a portable prompt-stack format. The MCP spec gets close because servers are tool-side portable, but the prompt-and-context layer that tells the LLM how to use those tools is still per-client. A simple JSON schema for "claude.context.json" or similar that all four clients could read would compound personal productivity faster than any model upgrade.
The surprising daily uses come from chaining LLM output through Bitcoin/Lightning tools — using Claude to draft a NIP-99 marketplace listing, an LNURL-pay metadata blob, or a BIP-21 payment request URL where the syntax is fiddly and the LLM's recall of the spec is faster than reading it again. Same pattern works for Bitcoin Core RPC commands and lncli flag combinations.
Watching for whichever client ships portable prompt-stacks first — Cursor has the largest user base, Aider has the most mature OSS community, and Claude Code has the deepest Anthropic-side integration; whichever moves shifts the workflow lock-in.