The good: It's great to see they've baked in the concept of setup -> plan -> act into the tool with the use of specs If you're someone who currently only has Copilot / Q dev, this is a good step in the right direction - if you don't mind changing your IDE. I love that it has a command / task queuing system. Hooks = good.
Goes either way: Even though it uses Q under the bonnet, it does seem somewhat better than Q although I think most of that is down to the use of plan -> act workflows
The not good: There's no reason at all for it to be a VSCode fork and running multiple IDEs for every vendor that wants me to use their products is a PITA. It seems to massively over-complicate solutions, for things that could be quite simple even if the tasks are well defined it likes to create many files and go down very extensive and complex implementation patterns. This has to be something to do with the app itself as Sonnet 4 does not do this with Cline/Roo Code so hopefully it can be fixed (but maybe it suits the kind of folks that write big java apps!). It doesn't seem to have any integrated web browser capabilities to allow the model to run up and explore the app while inspecting the js console browser side like Cline / Roo have. My installation has mysteriously become 'corrupted' and needed reinstalling several times. There's no global rules, you have to keep a note of them somewhere and copy paste them into each project. GH Issue #25
The bad: It's slower than Cline / Roo Code, it just takes a lot longer to get things done. It's very easy to hit the rate limits and be blocked for an undefined amount of time before you can continue working. There's lots of MCP bugs mainly relating to it still not supporting the standard streamableHTTP or SSE modes and breaks all MCPs without any warning or logs if you try to add one. GH Issue #23 The version of VSCode it's built from is quite out of date already, which rings alarm bells for how well such a large, complex application will be maintained and rolled out at speed over time.