Anyone who’s read my blog or watched my videos knows how much I love Cursor. I’ve been using AI to help me write code basically ever since AI got decent enough to do it, but Cursor has made it incredibly easy. It’s cheap, and I just love using it—I’ve had great results with it.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve heard a lot of people talking about Claude Code, and I’ve heard some great things about it too. But I hadn’t really had a chance to play with it. Even though I use Linux VMs constantly throughout the day, my main daily drivers are Windows systems, and Claude Code only runs on Mac or Linux. So once again, I had heard good things about it (and I’m a huge fan of Claude—I’m actually dictating this blog post to Claude right now), but I hadn’t had a chance to use Claude Code.
The Black Hat Arsenal Opportunity
Well, I submitted my “Chasing Your Tail” code from my Black Hat talk a couple years ago to Black Hat Arsenal this year, and it got accepted. So I need to clean up and make some improvements to the code. The code is Python and designed to run on a Raspberry Pi 5—or technically any small, low-powered device that can get Kismet running on it and has Python—but it’s specifically running on a Raspberry Pi.
Here’s the problem: Cursor has a Linux ARM executable, but it just instantly crashes on the Pi. I’ve seen a lot of people report this issue, and there have been many support tickets, but nothing’s really been done about it. I think it has something to do with attempting hardware acceleration that you can’t really turn off, and that just crushes the Pi, which makes sense.
Enter Claude Code
So now I had this code that needed fixing, I definitely wanted to use AI, and Cursor wasn’t an option directly on the system. I could SSH in or remote desktop in—there are other options—but I figured, hey, let’s give Claude Code a try since I’ve been meaning to.
Claude Code, like Cursor, normally charges around $20 a month. But Claude Code is actually free to use if you have a Pro Claude subscription. I have the $20 a month Claude subscription, so that just lets me use Claude Code for free too, which is fantastic. The nice thing is if you don’t have a Claude subscription, you can just get an API key and pay per use.
Claude Code works in the command line instead of a GUI like Cursor, but it turns the terminal into almost like a little IDE. You just interact with it, tell it what you want, and then it starts going out and solving problems. It has a lot of little agents working on different things.
Why I’m Impressed
Daniel Miessler, who I respect quite a bit and was a big Cursor fan as well, said Cursor is now in his number two spot behind Claude Code. He mentioned two reasons: number one, he likes that Claude Code is what they use internally at Anthropic for Claude development, so obviously they’re going to stand behind the product and improve it. But number two is that he just seems to get better results—Claude Code does better at handling and dealing with things.
So far, I have to say I think he might be right. I’ve had really good results using Claude Code directly on the Raspberry Pi. It was one of those things where I didn’t set out just to play with Claude Code—I had a genuine need for it. I wanted to develop something on the Raspberry Pi itself, and Claude Code has been a fantastic option for testing things, solving problems, analyzing the code, automatically generating documentation, and more.
My Recommendation
If you have a Claude Pro subscription and you’re using Linux or Mac, there’s absolutely no reason for you not to try Claude Code. I’ve been very pleased with the results, and I think you likely will be too.
