That’s pretty much the same summary that I presented internally, with emphasis on reviewing every change that AI makes in every file, and that if you’re struggling to get AI to make a change successfully and have been reviewing and improving your prompt and it still fails after several attempts then it’s time to code it the old fashoned way 
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As for Claude Code, I would put that pretty much in the same bucket as Windsurf and Cursor in terms of improvement over web chat coding but the experience is not as polished, even with the VSCode extension. OpenAI’s Codex Cli is also getting planning features soon and may be another good alternative (and there are other less frequently used tools but I’m not across how good they are). The thing with CC and Codex and other cli based tools is that the user experience is not as good as Windsurf or Cursor. Each tool has it’s pros and cons but the tight integration in the forked VSCode IDEs allows for more features compared to the VSCode extensions or terminal only tools.
For subscription costs I have seen lots of people complaining about the limits in CC but none with Windsurf which has a “credit” cost metric, where one prompt = 1 default credit regardless of the context size or number of steps required to complete the prompt, and each model has a different credit multiplier (e.g. Sonnet 4.5 = 3x, GPT-5 high reasoning = 2x). So the US$15/mo Pro plan gets you 500 credits ~= 165 prompts with Sonnet 4.5, or around 8 per day (remember they can perform complex changes), and add-on is US$10 for 250 credits (~80 prompts).