I've been running Claude Code in my Cursor IDE for a while now via extension. I like the setup, and I direct Claude on one task at a time, while still having full access to my code (and nice completions via Cursor). I still spend time tweaking, etc. before committing. I have zero interest in these new "swarms of agents" they are trying to force on us from every direction. I can barely keep straight my code working on one feature at a time. AI has greatly helped me speed that up, but working serially has resulted in the best quality for me. I'll likely drop Cursor for good now and switch back to vanilla VsCode with CC.
I just wish Claude code would also offer fast inline auto complete. Sometimes I’ll just want to have a function definition or some boilerplate spelled out without waiting for the slow Claude response. Or actively switching models.
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Maybe I can set up a shortcut for that?
Is there a significant difference between Claude Code in VSCode and Copilot in VSCode? I’ve been using Copilot with the Claude models (including Sonnet/Opus 4.6) and it seems to work spectacularly.
My subscription is only $10 a month, and it has unlimited inline suggestions. I just wonder if I’m missing anything.
> Is there a significant difference between Claude Code in VSCode and Copilot in VSCode? I’ve been using Copilot with the Claude models (including Sonnet/Opus 4.6) and it seems to work spectacularly.
Most models are limited to 200k context in GitHub Copilot. The Claude models are now 1M context elsewhere.
I tried copilot for a bit in vscode as well with opus and felt something was off. Somehow as if copilots harness around it just wasn’t as good. But I can’t give solid prove.
The $10/month plan offers a quite limited number of tokens for advanced models. And if you are not careful and set the model to Auto it will quickly deplete them.
Not a real solution but you could try using AquaVoice for dictation. It can gather screen context so you just say the function name out loud and it capitalizes and spells everything correctly. (Even hard cases!)
This. I have effectively used multiple agents to do large refactors. I have not used them for greenfield development. How are folks leveraging the agentic swarm, and how are you managing code quality and governance? Does anyone know of a site that highlights code, features, or products produced by this type of development?
I think it would be fantastic to have a reference site for significant, complex projects either developed or substantially extended primarily via agent(s). Every time I look at someone's incredible example of a workflow for handling big context projects, it ends up being a greenfield static microblog example with vague, arm-wavey assertions that it will definitely scale.
Same setup here. Claude Code in the terminal, one task at a time. The swarm thing never clicked for me. When I'm building I need to hold the full context in my head, and watching the agent work is actually part of that. I catch things I missed in my own prompt while it's thinking. Parallelizing that would just mean reviewing code I have no mental model for. Serial is slower on paper but the code actually works at the end.
I think these products are trying to capture no-coders, which is a recipe for disaster. They're trying to create architectures so people can say "build me X" and the agents perform magic end-to-end, output a hot pile of garbage. The actual value here is taking the finger-to-keyboard burden off the user and abstracting up to architect level. That means you still need to be able to review the goddamn code and offer an opinion on it to end up with something good. AI slop comes from people who don't have the skills and context to offer any valuable opinion or pushback to the AI.
Vanilla CC is the best IMO.
I did, but having the buttons on the bottom vs the side is a deal breaker for me, esp. since they are VERY tiny on my 4K screen. I can barely even get my mouse over them, and it seems they aren't movable to the left side like VSC? Am I missing something? Hard to believe this shipped, it is unusable for me.
>I have zero interest in these new "swarms of agents"
I think you misunderstand "swarms of agents", based on what you say above. An agent swarm, in my understanding and checked via a google search, does not imply working on multiple features at one time.
It is working on one feature with multiple agents taking different roles on that task. Like maybe a python expert, a code simplifier, a UI/UX expert, a QA tester, and a devils advocate working together to implement a feature.
"Expertise" is a completely different beast from "knowledge".
Expecting to gain it from a model only through prompting is similar to expecting to become capable of something only because you bought a book on the topic.
> does not imply working on multiple features at one time.
How can multiple parallel agents some local and some in the cloud be working on a single task?
How can:
> All local and cloud agents appear in the sidebar, including the ones you kick off from mobile, web, desktop, Slack, GitHub, and Linear.
(From the announcement, under “Run many agents in parallel”)
…be working on the same task?
Subagents are different, but the OP is not confused about what cursor is pushing, and it is not what you describe.
Same way a developer and designer can work on the same feature during the same week? Or two developers working on the same feature during the same week. They can have a common api contract and then one builds the frontend and the other works on the backend.
They are confused in the word they use: the article on what Cursor is pushing does not, according to ^F, mention "swarm" at all. Since we have a word for multiple agents working on one task, it is probably best not to use that word if you are referring to multiple agents working on multiple tasks, right?
I bring it up not to be pedantic, but because if you think it implies multi-tasking and dismiss it, you are missing out on it's ability to help in single-tasking.
I think cursor doesn't make distinction between single or multiple logical tasks for swarm-like workloads. Subagents is the word they use for the swarm workers.
Fwiw when I select multiple models for a prompt it just feeds the same prompt to them in parallel (isolated worktrees), this isn't the same as the swarm pattern in 2.4+ (default no worktrees).
Subagents are isolated context windows, which means they cannot get polluted as easily with garbage from the main thread. You can have multiple of them running in parallel doing their own separate things in service of whatever your own “brain thread”… it’s handy because one might be exploring some aspect of what you are working on while another is looking at it from a different perspective.
I think the people doing multiple brain threads at once are doing that because the damn tools are so fucking slow. Give it little while and I’m sure these things will take significantly less time to generate tokens. So much so that brand new bottlenecks will open up…
> have zero interest in these new "swarms of agents" they are trying to force on us from every direction.
Good for you! Personally waiting for one agent to do something while I shove my thumb up my butt just waiting around for it to generate code that I'll have to fix anyway is peak opposite of flow state, so I've eagerly adopted agents (how much free will I had in that decision is for philosophers to decide) so there's just more going on so I don't get bored. (Cue the inevitable accusations of me astroturfing or that this was written by AI. Ima delve into that one and tell there was not. Not unless you count me having stonks in the US stock market as being paid off by Big AI.)
I have personally found that I cannot context switch between thinking deeply about two separate problems and workstreams without a significant cognitive context-switching cost. If it's context-switching between things that don't require super-deep thought, it's definitely doable, but I'm still way more mentally burnt-out after an hour or two of essentially speed-running review of small PRs from a bunch of different sources.
Curious to know more about your work:
Are your agents working on tangential problems? If so, how do you ensure you're still thinking at a sufficient level of depth and capacity about each problem each agent is working on?
Or are they working on different threads of the same problem? If so, how do you keep them from stepping on each other's toes? People mention git worktrees, but that doesn't solve the conflict problem for multiple agents touching the same areas of functionality (i.e. you just move the conflict problem to the PR merge stage)
It's easier when I have 10 simple problems as a part of one larger initiative/project. Think like "we had these 10 minor bugs/tweaks we wanted to make after a demo review". I can keep that straight. A bunch of agents working in parallel makes me notably faster there though actually reviewing all the output is still the bottleneck.
It's basically impossible when I'm working on multiple separate tasks that each require a lot of mental context. Two separate projects/products my team owns, two really hard technical problems, etc. This has been true before and after AI - big mental context switches are really expensive and people can't multitask despite how good we are at convincing ourselves we can.
I expect a lot of folks experience here depends heavily on how much of their work is the former vs the later. I also expect that there's a lot of feeling busy while not actually moving much faster.
Yes, also doesn't work for me. If the changes are simple, it is fine but if the changes are complex and there isn't a clear guideline then there is no AI that is good enough or even close to it. Gives you a few days of feeling productive and then weeks of trying to tidy up the mess.
Also, I have noticed, strangely, that Claude is noticeably less compliant than GPT. If you ask a question, it will answer and then try to immediately make changes (which may not be related). If you say something isn't working, it will challenge you and it was tested (it wasn't). For a company that is seems to focus so much on ethics, they have produced an LLM that displays a clear disregard for users (perhaps that isn't a surprise). Either way, it is a very bad model for "agent swarm" style coding. I have been through this extensively but it will write bad code that doesn't work in a subtle way, it will tell that it works and that the issues relate to the way you are using the program, and then it will do the same thing five minutes later.
The tooling in this area is very good. The problem is that the AI cannot be trusted to write complex code. Imo, the future is something like Cerbaras Code that offers a speed up for single-threaded work. In most cases, I am just being lazy...I know what I want to write, I don't need the AI to do it, and I am seeing that I am faster if I just single-thread it.
Only counterpoint to this is that swarms are good for long-running admin, housekeeping, etc. Nowhere near what has been promised but not terrible.
I tried swarms as well, but I came back to you as well. It’s not worth it even th e small worse description double-checking, fine-tuning is not worth the effort the worse code will cost me in the future. Also when I don’t know about it.
How does one work with a team of developers to solve larger problems? You break down the problems into digestible chunks and have each teammate tackle a stack of those tasks.
Its far closer to being a project manager than it is being a solo developer.
It's not that difficult. You get it to work on one deep problem, then another does more trivial bug fixes/optimizations, etc. Maybe in another you're architecting the next complex feature, another fixes tests, etc etc
> Personally waiting for one agent to do something while I shove my thumb up my butt just waiting around for it to generate code that I'll have to fix anyway
I spend that time watching it think and then contemplating the problem further since often, as deep and elaborate as my prompts are, I've forgotten something. I suspect it might be different if you are building something like a CRUD app, but if you are building a very complicated piece of software, context switching to a new topic while it is working is pretty tough. It is pretty fast anyway and can write the amount of code I would normally write in half a day in like 15 minutes.
In my workflow, it's totally interactive: Give the LLM some instructions, wait very briefly, look at code diff #1, correct/fix it before approving it, look at code diff #2, correct/fix it before approving it, sometimes hitting ESC and stopping the show because the agent needs to be course corrected... It's an active fight. No way I'm going to just "pre-approve all" and walk away to get coffee. The LLMs are not ready for that yet.
I don't know how you'd manage a "swarm" of agents without pre-approving them all. When one has a diff, do you review it, and then another one comes in with an unrelated diff, and you context switch and approve that, then a third one comes in with a tool use it wants to do... That sounds absolutely exhausting.
It sounds like diff #2 depends on approval of diff #1? But with cursor it's a set of diffs that'll be retroactively approved or rejected one by one.
So you can get coffee during the thinking and still have interactive checks. Swarm changes nothing about this, except affecting the thinking time.
I find it puzzling whenever someone claims to reach "flow" or "zen state" when using these tools. Reviewing and testing code, constantly switching contexts, juggling model contexts, coming up with prompt incantations to coax the model into the right direction, etc., is so mentally taxing and full of interruptions and micromanagement that it's practically impossible to achieve any sort of "flow" or "zen state".
This is in no way comparable to the "flow" state that programmers sometimes achieve, which is reached when the person has a clear mental model of the program, understands all relevant context and APIs, and is able to easily translate their thoughts and program requirements into functional code. The reason why interrupting someone in this state is so disruptive is because it can take quite a while to reach it again.
Working with LLMs is the complete opposite of this.
Thank you so much. These comments let me believe in my sanity in an over-hyped world.
I see how people think its more productive, but honestly I iterate on my code like 10-15 times before it goes into production, to make sure it logs the right things, it communicates intent clearly, the types are shared and defined where they should be. It’s stored in the right folder and so on.
Whilst the laziness to just pass it to CC is there I feel more productive writing it on my own, because I go in small iterations. Especially when I need to test stuff.
Let’s say I have to build an automated workflow and for step 1 alone I need to test error handling, max concurrency, set up idempotency, proper logging. Proper intent communication to my future self. Once I’m done I never have to worry about this specific code again (ok some error can be tricky to be fair), but often this function is just practically my thought and whenever i need it. This only works with good variable naming and also good spacing of a function. Nobody really talks about it, but if a very unimportant part takes a lot of space in a service it should be probably refactored into a smaller service.
The goal is to have a function that I probably never have to look again and if I have to do it answers me as fast as possible all the questions my future self would ask when he’s forgotten what decisions needed to be made or how the external parts are working. When it breaks I know what went wrong and when I run it in an orchestration I have the right amount of feedback.
As others I could go very long about that and I’m aware of the other side of the coin overengineering, but I just feel that having solid composable units is just actually enabling to later build features and functionality that might be moat.
Slow, flaky units aren’t less likely to become an asset..
And even if I let AI draft the initial flow, honestly the review will never be as good as the step by step stuff I built.
I have to say AI is great to improve you as a developer to double check you, to answer (broad questions), before it gets to detailed and you need to experiment or read docs. Helps to cover all the basics
So don't write slow flakey unit tests? Or better yet, have the AI make them not slow and not flakey? Of if you wanna be old school, figure out why they're flakey yourself and then fix it? If it's a time thing then fix that or if it's a database thing then mock the hell out of that and integration test, but at this point if your tests suck, you only have yourself to blame.
Sorry I don’t get your point and you didn’t seem to get mine.
I’m saying I would guess I’m faster building manually then to let AI write it, arguably it won’t even achieve the level I feel best with in the future aka the one having the best business impact to my project.
Also the way I semantically define unit tests is that they are instant and non-flaky as they are deterministic else it would be a service for me.
I can lose track of time watching a movie or playing a video game, but it's not what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi would call "flow state", but just immersion.
For my work I’ve never found myself sitting around with nothing to do because there’s always so much review of the generated code that needs to be done
The only way I can imagine needing to run multiple agents in parallel for code gen is if I’m just not reviewing the output. I’ve done some throwaway projects where I can work like that, but I’ve reviewed so much LLM generated code that there is no way I’m going to be having LLMs generate code and just merge it with a quick review on projects that matter. I treat it like pair programming where my pair programmer doesn’t care when I throw away their work
Why is this comment so pale I cat read it? What’s the contrast on this is this accessible to anyone?
I’m guessing it was downvoted by the masses but at the same time I’d like the choice to be able to read it I’m not that into what the general public think about something.
I’m getting into downmaxxing at this point. I love that you have to earn being negative on this site. Give it to me.
Because the AI apologists cannot deal with the much studied and proven placebo effect of perceived increased productivity, so they have to try and make themselves feel
better by claiming that others are lagging behind in a race no one else is really interesting in running.
Cursor has been my main AI tool for over a year now.
I've been trying to use Claude Code seriously for over a month, but every time I do it, I get the impression that it would take me less work to do with Cursor.
I'm on the enterprise plan, so it can get pricey. This is why I used to stick mostly to auto mode.
Now Composer 2 has taken over as my default model. It is not as intelligent as OpenAI's or Anthropic's flagship models, but I feel it has as good as or better intuition. With way better pricing. It can get stuck in more complex tasks though.
Being able to get in the loop, stop and instruct or change models makes all the difference. And that is why I've stayed in the editor mode until now. Let's see if 3.0 changes that.
I was a Cursor loyal until I was spending around $2k a week with premium models and my team had a discussion about whether we’d want to use more Cursor over hire another engineer. We unanimously agreed we’d rather hire another team member. I’m more productive than ever but I’m burning out.
Anyway, as a result, I switched to Claude Code Max and I am equally as prolific and paying 1/10th the price. I get my cake and to eat it, too. *Note there’s a Cursor Ultra, which at quick glance seems akin to Claude Code Max. Notice that both are individual plans, I believe I’m correct you benefit from choosing those token-wise over a team or enterprise plan?
Anyway, you’re right Claude Code is less ergonomic; generally slower. I was losing my mind over Opus in Cursor spinning up subagents. I don’t notice that happen nearly as frequently in Claude Code itself. I think it has to do with my relatively basic configuration. CC keeps getting better the more context I feed it though, which is stuff like homegrown linters to enforce architecture.
All to say, Cursor’s pricing model is problematic and left a bad taste in my mouth. Claude Code seems to need a bunch of hand holding at first to be magical. Pick your poison
> Anyway, you’re right Claude Code is less ergonomic; generally slower.
The secret in my experience is parallelization - Cursor might be faster or have better ergo for a single task, but Claude Code really shines when you have 6 tasks that are fairly independent.
If you treat CC as just another terminal tool and heavily use git worktrees, the overall productivity shoots through the window. I've been using a tool called Ouijit[1] for this (disclosure: the dev is an old colleague of mine), and I genuinely do not think I could go back to using Cursor or any other traditional IDE+agent. I barely even open the code in an editor anymore, primarily interacting through the term with Vim when I need to pull the wires out.
Cursor can do that well too. Their code review feature usually gives a handful of independent feedbacks. I just trigger agents independently for all of those. Other integrations with Linear and Slack are also very handy to getting into this workflow. Seems like the 3.0 version is aiming at getting better at this use case.
FWIW I'm not saying Cursor is not capable of this, but that all of the 'Cursor' bits are superfluous, and using tools that bring you closer to the 'bare metal' of the terminal actually give you both more flexibility (I can run Claude Code, Crush, Codex, OpenCode, etc) and remove an entire layer of abstraction that I believe hinders a devs ability to really go all in on agentic engineering.
I started using Cursor and it was my daily driver for a year or two, but I haven't looked back once in regret moving more towards a terminal focused workflow. (Not to mention the pricing of Cursor being absolutely abysmal as well, although often comped by employers)
I've been using Codex since before ChatGPT (the OG version) and CC since launch. For me personally - Claude Code with Opus/Sonnet generally has better taste, more personality in interactions, and is more willing to just do the work. Paired with skills, LSPs, linters, and hooks, it works very well. I think of the two like this:
Claude Code with Opus/Sonnet is the L7 senior engineer still gunning for promotion. Hasn't hit burnout, hasn't been ground down by terrible teams yet. Capable and willing to get their hands dirty.
Codex (the harness) with GPT-5.4 or 5.3-codex is fantastic but terse. Some of the UX frustrates me. I want a visual task list. That said, Codex as a harness is phenomenal. Think of it as the senior EM / CTO-in-waiting who won't write new code without complaining and nitpicking for hours. But they'll thoroughly tear your code apart and produce a plan you can execute yourself or pass to Claude Code.
Both are great, and so is Factory Droid. Also worth checking out Compound Engineering from Every.to if you haven't.
here is example of project i worked using codex, it took 10 iterations just to get github actions right https://github.com/newbeelearn/whisper.cpp . you can see the commits made by codex. Project was quite simple it needs to modify whisper to add support for transcribing voice with start/stop keys and copy the transcription to clipboard when stopped. That's it.
It performs poorly as compare to CC which gets it right in one shot.
The workflow that got me into Cloud Code was instructing it that whenever I create a new feature or bug, it should make a new git worktree. And then when I'm done, merge that back to main and delete the worktree. That enables me to open up three plus different Cloud Code's and work on three different things at the same time. As long as they're not directly overlapping, it works great.
I find it interesting that you are on the enterprise plan and are not default willing to pay more for more intelligence. Most people I know who are on the enterprise plan are wishing there existed a 2x intelligent model with 2x price.
My company is going through the exact opposite, so it kinda depends on the company. We are actively encouraging our devs to NOT use Cursor because of how much more expensive it is compared to other tools we have from our calculations and they even considered dropping Cursor at contract renewal altogether due to their costs being higher than other tools.
most tasks I can do better and faster with composer 2
a fellow engineer reported a bug on a code I had written a few months back.
I used his report as prompt for composer 2, gpt-5.4-high and claude-4.6-opus-max-thinking.
composer found the issue spot on.
gpt found another possible vector a couple of minutes later, but a way less likely one and one that would eventually self heal (thus not actually reproducing what we observed on production).
claude had barely started when the other two had finished
also, i don't have a budget per se.
but it is expected that i over deliver if i'm over spending
I echo the others' sentiments that I still strongly prefer to write code mostly manually, assisted by Tab completions, and only generate piecewise via Cmd+K where I'm not sure about APIs or forgot the exact syntax. Chatting in Ask only mode about more complex problems.
Maybe I'm not a 10x developer, I'm fine with that.
Cursor shoving Agents down my throat made me abandon and cancel it once this year. I jumped around between Sublime, Zed, VS Code, and alas none of them has a Tab completion experience that even remotely compares with Cursor, so I had to switch back.
If possible, I'll probably stay on v2 until it's deprecated. Hope Zed catches by that time.
Try Mercury by Inception. It's available as autocomplete in Zed. Last time I tried it, Zed had an API key hidden in their docs that allowed you to use it for free
The crazy thing is that it's a diffusion-based LLM. That makes it very fast, like Cursor Tab, and the outputs seem very accurate in my limited testing (although I find Cursor Tab to still feel "like 10% better")
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That said, you should really give agentic coding a la Claude Code a try. It's gotten incredibly good. I still need to check the outputs of course, but after using it for 2-3 days, I've learned to "think" about how to tackle a problem with it similarly like I had to learn when first picking up programming.
Once I did, suddenly it didn't feel risky and weird anymore, because it's doing what I would've done manually anyways. Step by step. It might not be as blackboxy as you think it is
You might want to try this, one step ahead of Ctrl+K
Define the interface and functions and let the AI fill in the blanks.
Eg: I want XYZ class with methodFoo and methodBar which connects to APIabcd and fetch details. Define classes for response types based on API documentation at ...., use localLibraryXYZ for ABCD.
This is the way I found to work well for me. I maintain a tight grip over the architecture, even the low level architecture, and LLM writes code I can't be bothered to write.
I find tab completions very irritating. They're "almost" correct but miss some detail. I'd rather review all of that at once rather than when writing code.
Unfortunately, I think Cursor is making progressively more difficult to use other AI provider via extension, mostly due to the fact that they are reserving the secondary sidebar for their own chat interface. This makes it super unpractical to use the Codex and Claude extension, as now they all need to share the primary sidebar. (Before it was not optimal, but it was at least possible.)
As many have pointed out, the cost of token via Cursor is prohibitive compared to having a CC or Codex subscription, so I think the new update brings little to current users, but reduces Cursor's usability.
I think Cursor should go in the direction of embracing other provider's extensions and go for a more integrated and customizable IDE, rather than a one-solution-fits-all kind of an approach. Today I opened VSC again after a log time.
I mean it makes sense for them to be somewhat antagonistic towards these flows because every time you use a different agentic extension or tool inside of Cursor, Cursor loses your money and data.
They're also churning with enterprise customers because for lots of customers on next contract renewal their pricing is increasing like 4-8x (depending on usage patterns but this was what we calculated for most of our devs) because they are slowly moving enterprise customers to usage based only plus a surcharge per million tokens, which they already did with personal sub customers, and all of the latest models are becoming Max mode only. My company is currently going through this and we've committed to way less spend with Cursor for our renewal and are signing with Anthropic and telling devs to prefer using claude code instead. I wouldn't be surprised if next year we cancel altogether and tell all devs to go back to VSCode or some other preferred editor.
I don't see a world where Cursor continues to be viable for 5-10 more years. Lots of people were originally saying "the moat is not in being an model provider" for agentic tools and thats turning out to be very much false in my opinion at least if you care about being a business.
yeah good point. I think this is to be seen though. Right now AI tokens, especially via OpenAI/Anthropic subscriptions, are heavily subsidized. If token cost between the API and subscriptions should even out though, then I think Cursor might well be back in the race.
The premise of Zed is quite appealing, but I'm not sure I'm ready to switch due to the missing extension ecosystem of VSC. For example, at the moment I'm using the Playwright and Vite ones to quickly run and debug tests.
I used to have a pro-cursor subscription, but it was way too expensive because I'd always hit my limit. I realized I could just use claude code + the free version of cursor for autocomplete and it worked even better. At this point, I'm not understanding the value that cursor is bringing. A souped up claude code? All I have to do is wait a few months and anything useful will be in claude code or codex or whatever.
So unfortunately this is it for me too. I liked Cursor as a tool, but when i switched to Claude I realized i was getting WAY better value for money. I spent $1800 the month before, i spent $200 the next.
I'm now switching between Claude and Codex for less than 1/4 of what I was spending in December.
Yeah, I tried using their Composer model (which I guess is Kimi) and it just feels sub-Sonnet to me. Whereas a Claude Max sub gets me more Opus than I can use in a month.
Which sucks because Cursor is clearly better than Anthropic at building UIs. CC desktop is buggy af.
Codex is nearly Opus level though. Anyone know if OpenAI permits Max subs to be used in Cursor?
Man, I wish they'd keep the old philosophy of letting the developer drive and the agent assist.
I feel like this design direction is leaning more towards a chat interface as a first class citizen and the code itself as a secondary concern.
I really don't like that.
Even when I'm using AI agents to write code, I still find myself spending most of my time reading and reasoning about code. Showing me little snippets of my repo in a chat window and changes made by the agent in a PR type visual does not help with this. If anything, it makes it more confusing to keep the context of the code in my head.
It's why I use Cursor over Claude Code, I still want to _code_ not just vibe my way through tickets.
My guess would be this is less driven by product philosophy, more driven by trying to maximise chances of a return on a very large amount of funding in an incredibly tough market up against formidable, absurdly well-funded competitors.
It's a very tough spot they're in. They have a great product in the code-first philosophy, but it may turn out it's too small a market where the margins will just be competed away to zero by open source, leaving only opportunity for the first-party model companies essentially.
They've obviously had a go at being a first-party model company to address this, but that didn't work.
I think the next best chance they see is going in the vibe-first direction and trying to claim a segment of that market, which they're obviously betting could be significantly bigger. It's faster changing and (a bit) newer and so the scope of opportunity is more unknown. There's maybe more chances to carve out success there, though honestly I think the likeliest outcome is it just ends up the same way.
Since the beginning people have been saying that Cursor only had a certain window of time to capitalise on. While everyone was scrambling to figure out how to build tools to take advantage of AI in coding, they were one of the fastest and best and made a superb product that has been hugely influential. But this might be what it looks like to see that window starting to close for them.
It's a very tough spot they put themselves into. If the goal wasn't to get filthy rich quick it would probably be possible to make a good product without that tough spot.
As these products mature people are going to see more of this stuff. These are the contours of the market. The technology is incredible but it’s still subservient to the economics of building products.
It’s the “why can’t Facebook just show me a chronological feed of people I follow”. Because it’s not in their interests to do so.
Yeah, and just like all social media platforms adopted short form video sooner or later they are going to give in to what consumers pay for (in attention or money). Right now it's anyone's guess what that might be in the context of software development.
I have been on the fence if I think composer is useful, but the speed argument is one I hadn’t really considered. I use cursor with Opus almost exclusively but the other day I tried using OpenCode locally with a 6-bit quantized version of Qwen 3.5 and holy crap the speed and latency were mind blowing. Even if not quite as sharp as big boi Opus and the gang.
Now you’ve got me thinking I should give composer another go because speed can be pretty darn great for more generic, basic, tasks.
Tried the cursor a few times, apart from a fancy layer on top of VS Code, it is way too expensive to use, it runs out of credit in a few tasks. On the other hand, vs code with copilot is slower and less 'intelligent', but it lasts longer, I get more work done with it. Recently, started using opencode inside vs code, it is similar to claude code, but needs some better integration with vs code.
> They've obviously had a go at being a first-party model company to address this, but that didn't work.
I thought there was an entire initiative to build their own coding model and the fine tunes of in Composer 1.5 and Composer 2 were just buying them time and training data
You know, it’s stuff like this making me think maybe the anti capitalists have a point.
A company makes a popular product customers like, but to satisfy the VCs the company must make a product the customers don’t like but could make the VCs more money.
Not sure this is the “invisible hand” Adam Smith had in mind.
"Invisible hand" doesn't force you to take VC funding. You can maintain (and many do) what VCs like to derisively call "lifestyle business". And GNU project somehow wasn't started in Soviet Union either. Editors of both kinds (non-VC funded business and FOSS) are widely available for you to use BTW.
The problems that Cursor is facing are directly resulted by the choices that its founders freely made previously.
Anti-capitalist here: Our point is actually the same point as the one Anti-feudalists had. The consumer hostility observed under capitalism is simply a corollary.
To be fair feudalism (the row-farming kind) kind of collapsed because people found better deals with the rise of trade and mercantilism and such. It wasn’t anything anybody needed to make points over.
IDEs seem headed in the same direction. Seriously, watching Codex rip apart binaries in parallel and Claude go from nothing to app in one prompt, I’m pretty sure there’s no need for me to look at any code. I’m fine using tools that just emit machine code if that’s more efficient.
We most generally lump Mercantilism in with Feudalism. The transition to Capitalism came with the rise of Liberalism (not the American political definition, the political philosophy one), which involved a lot of revolutions.
It is easier to imagine the end of the world then the end of feudalism.
I kind of like the story of how Malthus had his theory of societal collapse because he couldn’t imagine a better system then mercantilism. That societies would rather collapse then to end their colonial monopolies.
I see a similar theory today with around depopulation, that as society gets older and relatively fewer working age people there are, that society would rather collapse then we find a better system then Capitalism.
I am sure Malthusians could find similar reasons for why collapse was inevitable as the population grew.
For example I can imagine a young Malthus debating with the elderly Adam Smith, and Smith saying something like: “When societies open up their markets, those big bulk carrying cargo ships will be able to ship the required food to the food scarce areas. And when they do, they will enrich them selves as well as the farmers whom they buy the crops from, as the price of the grain will be much higher in these over-populated regions”.
The young Malthus, however, is not convinced and will reply: „Then the population will still grow, both in that ‘new market’ (as you call it), and among the farmers whom acquire that new wealth; and eventually those farmers will make wars or famine with the neighbors and those merchants over the scars resources. Societal collapse is inevitable.“
(I think I agree), Georgist here, Our point is also that these rent-seeking abilities (something which even the creator of capitalism famously hated the land-lords quite a lot)
This is the issue with something like Cursor and VC's funding because I feel like these private equities essentially seek rent in their own way by hollowing out the products from within, to maximize profits without doing efforts in a manner very similar to Rent-seeking, and most large companies also feel like a rent-seeking on the monopoly that they establish (like google or facebook)
I have made someone who was communist/socialist agree to georgism and I have had someone who was extremely capitalist agree to georgism, and to be honest, whether it be georgism or anti capitalism or socialism, I think that the world just wants a system where a person is treated with dignity within the economic cogs.
My opinion is that as long as we can all agree on the last premise about dignity for individuals within the economic cogs, we can all have meaningful conversations to make that a premise, hopefully a reality.
(I feel like the people who might deny dignity to people within this particular context, have either a bias/incentive to not look towards the problem, or are uninformed, or lack the energy to fight towards change within the system, and more importantly the _hope_ that the future can be better)
I am not hopeful about the current political systems (even around the whole-world at times), I feel like there should be more information and decentralization within politics.
Essentially, politics really just feel unaccountable to me, your vote really stops mattering to politicians if/when money starts talking. But technically, this system can be broken through with enough votes.
I really hope for a future where politics and politicians feel accountable and genuine, maybe even someone from down the street who we can have some chats with to actually know them.
Ironically or unironically, just as how the landlords pushed against Georgism/George within really making political difference, The same is happening right now as well where Online landlord monopolies dictate how people interpret and vote by using their algorithms/influence.
Politics like many other problems feel like a chicken and egg problem, like things work until they don't and things don't work until they do. At a more individual level, stepping outside of most algorithms and the reason why I joined hackernews is for doing something like this, myself.
Anarchist here. I can definitely see the appeal of Georgism. And if we must have a state (while we Anarchist work to dismantle the state apparatus) I am personally not convinced Communism is a superior alternative to Georgism. And I think you could probably convince many anarchists alike (as long as you strategically avoid mentioning the role of the state). And in either case, I will definitely stand next to a Georgist during the revolution in solidarity against Capitalism.
According to the comment I replied to you have to make the product VCs think will make VCs the most money, even if that’s at odds with what your customers are telling you they want.
It is more of a point that it may require leaving your old customers behind and disappointing them in order for you to find the customers you can provide the most value to.
Yeah, this model where you don't get an editor anymore feels like a step backwards. I don't want to give up LSPs, being able to step into/rename functions and stuff like that. I should still be the one in control of the code - the agent is the assistant, not me.
This is why Zed's direction felt pretty strong to me. Unfortunately their agentic features are kind of stagnating and the ACP extensions are riddled with issues.
We're building DevSwarm, and it's aiming to strike the balance between agentic coding in parallel without losing your IDE. Each workspace (worktree) gets a dedicated vscode instance, and in that instance we make it easy to fire up Claude Code, Codex, etc. Would love to hear if it hits the sweet spot we're going for.
This is why I use Claude Code though, it pairs well with a regular old text editor (in my case Sublime). I've always had an editor and a terminal open, plugging an AI into my terminal has been a fantastic enhancement to my work without really anything else changing or giving up any control.
I actually run a custom fork of Zed based on their master branch because of how stagnated the built-in agent is. Master branch Zed agent did get sub-agents, parallel threads, better thread management, and worktrees though, and I implemented agent skills and the ability to select which model to use for sub-agents for it. And with those features, I'm fairly satisfied.
No but I have now. It’s hard to tell from that few seconds but it doesn’t look like it’s really putting the developer in the driving seat, just providing a minimal escape hatch for manual edits.
It's still a very nice and fast editor, and you can just switch off those AI features. They're still releasing features and fixes for the non-AI parts.
Agreed completely on this (as a heavy daily user of Cursor). It's been the perfect in-between of coding by hand (never again!) and strictly "vibe coding" for me. Being able to keep my eyes on all the changes in a "traditional" IDE view helps me maintain a mental model of how my systems work.
I'm hoping in this new UI in v3 I can still get that experience (maybe it's just hidden behind a toggle somewhere for power users / not shown off in the marketing materials).
I'm an engineer at Cursor, can try to clarify questions here.
> I wish they'd keep the old philosophy of letting the developer drive and the agent assist. Even when I'm using AI agents to write code, I still find myself spending most of my time reading and reasoning about code.
We very much still believe this, which is why even in this new interface, you can still view/edit files, do remote SSH, go to definition and use LSPs, etc. It's hard to drive and ship real changes without those things in our opinion, even as agents continue to get better at writing code.
> I'm hoping in this new UI in v3 I can still get that experience (maybe it's just hidden behind a toggle somewhere for power users / not shown off in the marketing materials).
This new interface is a separate window, so if you prefer the Cursor 2 style, that continues to exist (and is also getting better).
That's good to hear, I might have jumped a little too quickly in my opinion. It's a bit of a Pavlovian response at this point seeing a product I very much love embrace a giant chat window as a UX redesign haha.
I would love to see more features on the roadmap that are more aligned with users like us that really embrace the Cursor 2 style with the code itself being the focal point. I'm sure there's a lot you can do there to help preserve code mental models when working with agents that don't hide the code behind a chat interface.
Reading diffs is an inescapable skill, needed for evaluating any kind of PR. This just makes it more interactive.
I just use Copilot with VS Code, but my flow is to just ask Claude to make a change across whatever files it needs to touch, then either accept the changes, edit the changes directly, or clarify whatever was different from my expectations.
Reading diffs is central to how I work with these agents.
How would they make money from the tokens then haha? The main revenue driver of these companies is to get people to use more tokens. That’s what they will optimise for. Getting the developers out of the way is the way to do it.
Isn’t Cursor’s business model mostly subscriptions? They’re the ones paying for inference, not the user directly, right? So wouldn’t they be incentivized to minimize token usage per unit of user value, not maximize raw tokens?
Nope. Enterprise you pay for seat to access all of the enterprise features and then you just pay for tokens as you go. Vast majority of their actual revenue comes from enterprise and their revenue is just api pass through to the model providers.
As a Cursor user who hasn't tried Claude Code yet, am I missing anything? I seem (sometimes) exceptionally productive in it and it's working for me. To my understanding, Claude Code is all terminal, but something like an IDE seems like the better interface to me: I want to see the file system, etc. It seems Cursor doesn't have the mindshare relative to Claude in public discussion spaces.
Claude Code is where you move up one abstraction layer. Almost everyone using it productively has spend a lot of time working on their harness, ensuring that everything is planned out and structured such that all that is left is really type in the code. This typically works without error. Before that, you interact a lot via Claude Code in whatever abstraction you feel is right.
That's basically it. You can review changes afterwards, but that's not the main point of Claude Code. It's a different workflow. It's built on the premise: given a tight and verifiable plan, AI will execute the actual coding correctly.
This will work, mostly, if you use the very best models with a very good and very specific harness.
Cursor, same as Copilot, has been used by people who are basically pair programming with the AI. So, on abstraction down.
I have no idea what is better, or faster. I suspect it depends at least on the problem, the AI, and the person.
> Cursor, same as Copilot, has been used by people who are basically pair programming with the AI. So, on abstraction down.
This is not really true anymore.
Cursor has better cloud agents than Claude. The multi-agent experience is better, the worktree management is better. Tagging specific code or files in chat is better.
It's hard for me to express the level of pain and frustration I feel going from Cursor to Claude / Conductor+Claude / Claude Extension for VS Code, Claude in Zed, etc.
Really hoping Claude puts more energy into Cowork as a competitor for Cursor and Codex.
I think you are still speaking in the lower abstraction in terms of zwaps' provided understanding. "Tagging specific code" or "files" is likely the type of interfacing most Claude Code users are _not_ doing.
Instead they are defining architecture through specs and verification-loops and attempting to one-shot solutions fitting clear tests. On reflection, I personally don't have many prompts with CC referencing files or code directly, rather I speak in specifications I can then track to a given instance of work in review.
This isn't to suggest you can't work at this abstraction in cursor or w/e interface, but the features you suggest are hardly relevant to the divide zwaps is identifying.
I feel like perhaps you haven't used Cursor. I use both CC and Cursor extensively and as far as I can tell there is nothing that the CC agent will do that Cursor won't do just as well (often using Opus as the backend) and at the same time I get the advantage of seeing the changes in a full IDE if I want to. Their new agent-forward UI hides the code if you don't want to see it as much, but I and many others think that it giving me a full, colourful graphical editor to view changes in is a huge advantage.
I'm not telling you to go use cursor, just to help clarify that you can drive both solutions with the exact same approach and skillset and get very similar results - the difference is the UI. I personally like being able to paste screenshots into the agent, etc.
Nobody is saying your workflow is wrong, it may even be better. However it is not how people use Claude Code or what its attraction is.
What you mention as advantages and features is not something CC users use or require.
On the other hand, Claude is trained on its harness (all but confirmed by Anthropic) so CC is likely just a bit better at its level of abstraction than in cursor.
And at the end, you can’t yet best the subscription.
Cursor does the same stuff but better in my opinion. It’s got an IDE focus but whatever agent pipeline they built is better at coding than Claude’s is and much much faster. I routinely fear for my career while using Cursor, but when I use Claude I wonder what all the hype is about.
That’s not to say Claude sucks, but I think Cursor is really underrated and not well known. I think the IDE focus hurts them with non professional developers, but try using it the same as with Claude and you’ll be surprised, I bet. You can hook it up to GitHub and never touch the IDE if you want to.
So that sounds like Claude Code is an inferior subset of Cursor. That Cursor can work like Claude Code, but Claude Code is lacking Cursor’s editing capabilities.
If you install the VS Code plugin, it's the same editing functionality. Cursor lacks a lot of the tooling in claude code that makes the experience a lot more... solid.
It's always funny to see people's reactions to AI because it's the same they would treat junior engineers if nobody was around to raise an eyebrow. I've had a super micromanager who was absolutely insistent on naming variables and whether the open brackets were on the same line or a new line. I've also had people who just gave me the desired functionality and let me figure out the in-between and put in my own creative features, etc with just slight feedback.
We have OG Cursor for the micromanagers (who want to approve/deny every line) and things like Claude Code for those who are less picky about the how, and able to be amazed at what it creates.
Yep. Cursor is remote indexing. It allows their agents to fish around in the code base more efficiently. I assume the Claude folks are working on this.
It's good to try Claude Code just so you focus on skills, agents, and CLAUDE.md
Then when you go back to Cursor it will still support all of those things in the settings.
Using Cursor you tend to not think about those as much since Cursor does a lot of it for you as part of the IDE integration. But it's good to refine it your own way.
But for the most part there isn't much difference.
Claude Code isn't really "all terminal" if you embed that terminal in your IDE. I still use Cursor (for now), but I embed a CC panel via extension. With this launch of Cursor 3, I'll probably get off Cursor for good. I have zero interest in this.
Probably momentum. It takes some effort to change tooling. This is why Cursor worked so well in the beginning. It just took over from VSCode seamlessly.
As someone whose work enforced a switch from Cursor to Claude Code, I do keep on top of the code by pairing it with an IDE, tracking/viewing changes etc. There's no real obstacle to using an IDE as you normally would, with Claude Code as a sidecar.
I tried that for a couple weeks and it's no where near as well integrated as Cursor. I hope they get there though because I like Zed.
Zed plus Claude feels more like using isolated browser extensions instead of something part of the browser (unless you pay for Zeds AI thing then the integration is marginally better).
AI labs think they’re building an autonomous replacement for software engineers, while software engineers see these systems as tools to supplement the process of software engineering.
Yeah that's the disconnect though right? Even with the best frontier models, you need to do a lot of system design work, planning, and reviewing before you can let these models run.
These models are infinitely more effective when piloted by a seasoned software engineer and that will always be the case so long as these models require some level of prompting to function.
Better prompts come from more knowledgeable users, and I don't think we can just make a better model to change that.
The idea we're going to completely replace software engineers with agents has always been delusional, so anchoring their roadmap to that future just seems silly from a product design perspective.
It's just frustrating Cursor had a good attitude towards AI coding agents then is seemingly abandoning that for what's likely a play to appease investors who are drunk on AI psychosis.
Edit: This comment might have come off more callous than I intended. I just really love Cursor as a product and don't want to see it get eaten by the "AI is going to replace everything!" crowd.
> AI labs think they’re building an autonomous replacement for software engineers
And management everywhere is convinced that thats what they are paying for. My company is replacing job titles with "builder". Apparently these tools will make builder out of paper pushers hiding in corporate beaurcarcy. I am suddenly same as them now per my company managment.
There are some critical parts of architecture where sometimes I really do need to see the code and even sometimes put a wall around it and tell the agent they can't touch it.
Exactly how I feel. If I wanted this agent-centric view without being able to easily see the code I would be using Claude Code.
I use Cursor because agents are not ready to be the ones driving. I need to drive. I still need to understand all the code (and easily browse it) and keep a close watch over what the AI is doing.
I vibe my way through my ideas. I look at LLM code sometimes to cry and cringe and then I beg LLM to have basic dignity and self respect to write code it shouldn’t be ashamed of. But then I instruct it to do something and it does it with speed I’m never able to achieve, even if the code is ugly. But it works.
In both cases, it's your processes (automated testing, review, manual QA) that is the bulwark against bugs and issues.
With AI, you can set up great processes like having it check every PR against the source code of your dependencies or having it generate tests for what's an intermediate step or ephemeral solution that you would never write tests for if you had to do it yourself.
There's this idea on HN that if you delegate too much to AI, you get worse code. Presumably not appreciating all the code-improving processes you can delegate to AI, particularly processes you were never doing for hand-written code.
Yes, there are so many. As in hand-written code. I don’t take LLM written code for granted and I rewrite is sometimes. I know it’s not perfect. But it’s useful.
Compile code is not perfect also. But who does hand-written assembler anymore? Yes, LLM is another layer, it would be ugly and slower but it’s much faster to use.
The thing is that with the code you've written you wrote it in a way that you understand and you have mental model of how it works therefore it is much easier to reason about potential edge cases that have not been covered.
They're targeting the 90% of code that doesn't really need to be looked at. Software is already so complex and interconnected that it is fully beyond human capabilities, each person only knows a tiny part of the stack. If you create your own full system from scratch, it's not going to be very generally useful.
Imagine you are the top engineer of your company. Everybody wants your attention, many meetings, design sessions, and of-course code reviews.
With Claude Code, I use Gitlab for reviewing code. And then I let Claude pull the comments.
It looks like the new UI has a big focus on multiple agents. While it feels wrong, the more you split up your work into smaller merge requests, the easier it is to review the work.
Chat first is the way to go since you want the agent busy making its code better. Let it first make plans, come up with different ideas, then after coding let it make sure it fully tests that it works. I can keep an agent occupied for over a hour with e2e tests, and it’s only a couple hundred lines of code in the end.
The philosophy still works, you just have to change your view. Instead of trying to work side by side with the agent on every turn (inside of your IDE), instead the agent performs a unit of work and then you review it. You can use your IDE to view the diff, or another diffing tool.
If you've dug in sufficiently on plan mode, then what the agent is executing is not a surprise and shouldn't need input. If it does, the plan was insufficient and/or the context around the request (agents.md, lessons.md, or whatever tools and documents you use ) weren't sufficient.
EDIT: Maybe it doesn't work in cursor, but I continue to use vscode to review diffs and dig in on changes.
Why I harp on owning your stack instead of outsourcing your Ai experience and interface to Big Ai. There are many frameworks that make this much easier today. I chose ADK which is more of a lift, but also works for non-coding use cases.
I'm not a developer — I build custom camper vans for a living. I started with Cursor and also ran Claude inside it via the extension. But I eventually moved away from it entirely. The reason is kind of the opposite of what most developers want: I can't read code at all, so an IDE with a file tree, editor panels and diffs is just noise to me. Now I do everything through the Claude Desktop app on Linux — it's an Electron app that started on Mac and made its way to Linux. It has a Chat tab, a Cowork tab, and a Code tab, so I never need to touch a terminal unless I want to. I just describe what I want and it works directly on the files without me ever seeing them. I've shipped a real Linux app with a GNOME extension, it's on GitHub with hopefully some active users soon. These tools have completely changed who gets to build software. Is there a reason why I should consider going back to using Cursor? Thank you all for your insights.
I am a developer by profession and this is the opposite of what I would want. The code is your ground truth. If all else fails, the code should reasonably be able to tell you why, and by being able to read it, it makes me independent from some closed model.
"I have never woodworked a day in my life, with Claude Carpenter I don't have to touch the work at all and can just vaguely ask for things and pray that it does something useful."
The comment itself looks/feels very AI influenced (if not entirely written by AI). Actually, since an hour ago (when this account first started posting), all comments from this account have that look/feel.
1. Cursor is multi-model, meaning you can use at least a dozen different models.
2. Cursor's UI allows you to edit files, and even have the good old auto-complete when editing code.
3. Cursor's VSCode-based IDE is still around! I still love using it daily.
4. Cursor also has a CLI.
5. Perhaps more importantly, Cursor has a Cloud platform product with automations, extremely long-lived agents and lots of other features to dispatch agents to work on different things at the same time.
I hope this comes off as constructive criticism, but I'm confused about what cursor is now.
Cursor is an IDE and an agentic interface and a cli tool and a platform that all work locally and and in the cloud and in the browser and supports dozens of different models.
I don't know how to use the thing anymore, or what the thing actually is.
I'm having the same issue, as a former Cursor user and current Claude Code addict. CC is a very clear mental model. So is "agent in your IDE," like Cursor used to be and Xcode is now. The advantage of my current setup is that it's the terminal and Xcode, just as it has been for over 20 years.
I applaud Cursor for experimenting with design, and seeing if there are better ways of collaborating with agents using a different type of workspace. But at the moment, it's hard to even justify the time spent kicking the tires on something new, closed source and paid.
Cursor was the tool you use to pair program with AI. Where the AI types the code, and you direct it as you go along. This is a workflow where you work in code and you end up with something fundamentally correct to your standards.
Claude Code is the tool you use if you want to move one abstraction layer up - use harness, specs, verifications etc. to nail down the thing such that the only task left is type in the code - a thing AI does well. This is a workflow where the correctness depends on a lot of factors, but the idea is to abstract one level up from code. Fundamentally, it would be successful if you don't need to look at code at all.
I think there is not enough data to conclusively say which of these two concepts is better, even taking into account some trajectory of model development.
I do feel that any reason I have for installing Cursor is that I want to do workflow 1, rather than workflow 2. Cause I have a pretty comprehensive setup of claude code (or opencode, or whatevs) and I think it does everything you list here.
So, as a product engineer, you probably wanna mention why it matters that Cursor UI allows you to edit files with auto-complete.
I would switch to Cursor 3 in a heartbeat if it supported Claude Agent SDK (w/ Claude Max subscription usage) and/or Codex the way that similar tools like Conductor do
And I would happily pay a seat based subscription fee or usage fees for cloud agents etc on top of this
Unfortunately very locked into these heavily subsidized subscription plans right now but I think from a product design and vision standpoint you guys are doing the best work in this space right now
Is there going to be any more development on the frontier of cursor tab completion and features like that (more focused on helping engineer's with llm's for complex tasks) since I feel this is the main reason I dont use claude code or codex. I want to be writing the code, since I want performant, small, codebases that I understand (I am writing eBPF stuff, so agentic coding doesnt work that well)
For $20 a month, I can plan and implements a couple features in 4 hours with Claude. Then I have to wait.
For $20 a month, I can plan and implement thousands of features using Composer 2 or Auto with Cursor. The usage limits are insanely higher. Yes, the depth of understanding is not Opus 4.6, but most work doesn't need that. And the work that does need it I pass to Claude.
I can code 8 hours a day using LLMs as my primary driver spending just $40 a month.
Agree with that, they seem really good limits for daily use on something like Chat GPT Pro $20 account. I'm in the curious situation of using the Codex CLI within Cursor IDE and not really getting value out of my $60 Cursor sub. Plus at every update it seems Cursor seems to break more of their UI in the 'not a cloud agent chat UI' vs the more traditional VSCode sort of layout of code first. I should probably cancel.
You can do this with copilot, for the $40/mo range, AND you get to use opus 4.6 for all of it. Copilot is absurdly cheap if you can make it fit your work profile.
Computer use in the cloud is the main reason I use them. It's a game changer. It has its own dev env with a browser / shell and can test what it wrote (a bit of a hassle to set it up, but when it's working, wow)
Brand recognition. Since "model-is-the-service", various previously-interesting companies become thin API resellers and the moat is between "selling a dollar for fifty cents" and Brand awareness.
I am not saying this in bad faith. Model companies cannot penetrate every niche with the same brand recognition as some other companies you would consider as "API resellers" do.
I kinda quit using it. The tab feature is useful when making minor or mundane changes, but I quite prefer the codex GUI if I am going to be relatively hands off with agents.
Every company I've worked at has still had a few engineers who insist on working exclusively in the CLI with vim/emacs prior to AI. Every other engineer used some flavor of a desktop app ranging from more minimal editors to incredibly complex IDEs. I expect we land back on UIs long term.
I won’t, but it does have a couple features Codex lags, including remote SSH (huge, because the easiest way to sandbox your agent is to put it into a VM), and the ability to kicking things of on your mobile and finishing up on your desktop (again, really nice if you get a good idea out on a walk, or while talking to a colleague.
These are features I am sure Codex will soon have, of course.
Then there is the advantage of multiple models: run a top level agent with an expensive model, that then kicks of other models that are less expensive - you can do this in Claude Code already (I believe), but obviously here you are limited to something like Haiku.
I love Cursor. As a Product Manager who's not really had coding experience, it's been very useful. I'm able to have a browser on the side and make changes easily, and click through exactly what I want to change rather than having the LLM guess which component I'm talking about. Having multiple models has also been great, as well as the MCP integration. Most times I don't need all the MCPs, but I like being able to turn them on or off based on what I'm doing, like JIRA or Grafana.
One of my favorite startups and I genuinely like to keep subscribing to them.
Really great improvements and can really feel the perf being a lot better.
The surprisingly lacking thing for me is the worktree support is really behind other tools. Conductor/Composer/Superset etc realized making the sidebar PRs/worktree focused rather than chat focused can feel great. But Cursors worktree support seems underbaked?
Just switched to Claude code with a max20 sub for ~200$/mo. Getting the same load done as previously with cursor api calls going over 7000$/mo. Now using the vscode/cursor plugin and have CC within cursor tabs natively - good combo, can recommend!
VS Code wouldn’t have won the mid-2010s editor wars if it was closed source (note that VS Code has not helped MS ramp people up to VS itself). The winner of that war was always going to be an open source editor, it was just Microsoft whose concept won out. Closed source editors like Coda failed to gain traction and even Sublime Text fell eventually.
If MS ever decided to discontinue VS Code or relicense it, there would be blood in the water. I guarantee you there would be multiple compelling competitors in under a year and probably a new open source winner with consolidation in 5.
So to answer your question: they would be forking Atom (which I think would’ve won otherwise).
> So to answer your question: they would be forking Atom (which I think would’ve won otherwise).
Atom was far slower than VS Code, despite both of them being built on Electron. I wouldn't have used Atom, but I use VS Code.
It is entirely possible that some other closed-source editor with a superior package/extension system would have won, or the "war" would have been postponed until Rust was ready enough for Zed to come along.
Sublime Text fell because VS Code was just better, not because it was closed source. I switched from Sublime Text to VS Code, and didn't care one bit how open or close either was.
Not saying there aren't people who care, there are, but they are a small minority.
VS Code only got better because it was open source though, the community contributed so much. Sublime Text was vastly superior in the beginning in pretty much every way.
Zed's not a VSCode clone, and it's fantastic and OSS. They don't really have a business model that I see working though, IMO. I pay them purely because I love the editor, but the editor is free. The AI integration is what you pay for, but I just run claude code in a terminal.
every AI lab have cli for agent coding. you don't need VS Code. if you want coding agent to write code for you just use cli then use any IDE, text editor or whatever you prefer to review, edit or write code.
There was a time that Eclipse was my preferred editor. It was free and it gave cool sexy features that all the cool kids who could afford Visual Studio had, and it worked on Linux!
Nowadays I'm basically a Neovim purist, but I have positive memories of it. I'm kind of afraid to revisit it at this point, though, since everyone hates on it and I suspect I wouldn't like it as much.
Did you consider IntelliJ, even just the community edition?
If not you really should. IntelliJ with Java is one of the best dev experiences I've ever had. I'm a VSCode fan for most other things but for Java I wouldn't even remotely consider using it over IntelliJ if I had the option :-)
I find a lot of these IDEs are simply not as useful as a CLI. When I'm running a full agentic workflow, I don't really need to see the contents of the files at all time, I'd actually say I often don't need to at all, because I can't really understand 10k lines of code per hour.
What role do you play in creating software? If you don't need to see any code, should your employer consider cutting your position? I'm very much pro-humans-in-the-workforce, but I can't understand how someone could be ok with doing so little at their job.
There is a large and growing segment of executives in the software world that is pushing this model hard, like betting their career on it. To them the “dark factory” is an inevitability. As a consequence, not only are developers choosing this path, but the companies they work for are in varying degrees selecting this path for them.
Most, if not all of them, are shooting themselves in the foot. I've been saying this for a long time. The only thing LLMs actually are useful for is automating labor and reducing the amount a worker can demand for their work. Don't fall for this trap.
The agents aren't going to orchestrate themselves.
You also don't need to write or read the code to build great software.
This is how many high output teams are working now:
- Human writes PRD (usually with help of agent)
- Agent breaks down PRD into engineering specs with human review and input on and on technical implementation (architecture decisions, etc)
- Team of agents implement PRDs
- Team of agents reviews PRDs and checks for fidelity against both PRD and spec, fixing automatically or asking human for input if PRD or spec is unclear
- Team of agents tests final work product against spec and presents to human for final verification
Humans writing code manually is over.
Humans reviewing code manually and in-detail is mostly over.
Humans directing high-level architecture is still here for now but will likely be reduced in the near future.
It’s not their code, and it’s not for them to understand. The endgame here is that code as we know it today is the “ASM” of tomorrow. The programming language of tomorrow is natural human-spoken language used carefully and methodically to articulate what the agent should build. At least this is the world we appear to be heading toward… quickly.
But the endgame is not here and will likely never be, because unlike ASM, LLMs are not deterministic. So what happens when you need to find the bug in the 100,000k LoC you generated in a few weeks that you've never read, and the agent can't help you ? And it happens a lot. I am not doing this myself so I can't comment, but I've heard many vibe coders commenting that a lot of the commits they do is about fixing the slop they outputted a week prior.
Personally, I keep trying OpenCode + Opus 4.6 and I don't find it that good. I mean it does an OK job, but the code is definitely less quality and at the moment I care too much about my codebase to let it grow into slop.
This is a really underwhelming UI for something that is agent-first. It looks like they're mimicking Notion.
The next generation of interfaces are not going to look like an evolution into minimalist text editor v250. This is like people iterating on terminals before building native or web applications.
Reading comments, I’m curios why would someone spend thousands for LLM coding? What are you building to justify these skyrocketing token consumption?
I’ve been using AI coding since GitHub copilot was in beta, used all IDEs in the market, and had very few occasions when I passed the $20 subscription limit. And when I did, that was when I decided to move from cursor to CC and Codex, and still, using them everyday and didn’t have to go above my limits.
I've spent US$16 700 last month. I made an autoscaling K8s cluster for distributed compilation/caching on a large C++ project. I also heavily modified the build system to use a forked version of `siso` compatible with our environment.
That meant we can go from 17 minutes on 32 cores to 5 minutes on a few hundred. And because it's distributed compilation we don't have to provision each developer with an overpowered build system they won't be using most of the time.
It could also eliminate our CI backlog because autoscaling. Over a few hundred engineers building this codebase this probably a few thousand hours of waiting a week.
This took me about 2 weeks as someone who graduated 9 months ago. Most of the tokens were spent in several hour long debugging sessions relating to distributed systems networking and tracing through gRPC logs because the system wasn't working until it did.
I think I'd need several years of experience and 6 months as a full time engineer to have accomplished the same thing pre-AI.
Since I work at a semiconductor company near Toronto there's nobody around with the distributed systems experience to mentor me. I did it mostly on my own as a side project because I read a blog post. I literally wouldn't have been able to complete this without AI.
I'm sure the actual solution is terrible compared to what a senior developer with experience would've created. But my company feels like it's getting ROI on the token spend so far even though it's double my salary.
I think if you’re a professional and you’re actually coding for >4 hours per day it makes sense. Also if you’re one of those weirdos that likes to command an army of agents.
Well I’m a software engineer and code more than 4 hours per day.
But I do check the generated code, make sure it doesn’t go banana. I wouldn’t do multiple features at the same time as I have no idea how people are checking the output after that.
I like AI coding and it accelerated my work, but I wouldn’t trust their output blindly
I don't think this is the direction where cursor users want to go, they basically free up the market for VSCode and Zed, and won't be able to compete against lab owning their model.
I'm confused how and if Cursor is still relevant since the Claude Code VSCode extension came out.
The biggest downside for me with Cursor was losing access to gated Microsoft extensions like Python and C#. Even when vibing there are times you will still need a debugger or intellisense.
I note in the comments lots of people saying they are moving back and this latest move looks like the final nail in the coffin for Cursor.
The instructions for say, https://cursor.com/docs/configuration/worktrees are for the 3.0 version now, and the version 2 docs lack images in Wayback Machine. Is there a way to see the old docs if you haven't upgraded?
If only Zed had more extensions I would use it consistently over Cursor to be honest but for now Cursor remains my daily driver.
I like the option for different models that I just don't get with Claude Code. I want an IDE to monitor files and understand the code, not just see snippets (I know that there is still the Editor view in Cursor but with the push towards the Agent view I feel it's headed into a Conductor direction and personally I'm not ready for that).
Just in case all of them are forks from VS Code... I'm pretty much sure you can port the extensions (eg, I used to use VS Code, then I moved to Cursor, then to Windsurf and now I went away and switched to Antigravity but the first 3 were able to install the same extensions)
Zed is not a fork of VS Code. It is one of the few genuine new editors in the last few years. Written in Rust and much smoother than VS Code and its forks.
Daily cursor user who's been previewing this a bit while it was in alpha.
I think it's a really solid release, and while cursor seems to have fallen out of the "cool kids club" in the past three months it remains the most practical tool for me doing AI-first work in a large production code base. The new UI works better in a world where agents are doing most of the work and I can hop back into the IDE interface to make changes.
We've set up a linear integration where I can delegate simpler tasks to cloud agents, and the ability to pick that work up in cursor if I need to go back in forth is a real productivity boost. The tighter integration with cloud agents is something I've been hoping for recently.
I appreciate not being tied at the hip to one model provider, and have never loved doing most of my work from the command line. I was on vs code + meta's internal fork of it for years prior to the current AI wave, so that was a pretty natural transition. I'm pretty optimistic on cursor's ability to win in the enterprise space, and think we're going to see open source models + dev tools win with indie devs over things like claude code as costs start getting passed down more and the gap between frontier models and open source gets tighter.
I don't agree with this direction. There is entirely too much cognitive load in the interface. The challenge now is how to distill the massive output and information of agent work - this is just surfacing it all to you
The only reason I use Cursor is because I want an ide with agents sometimes. I do not want a gui for just agents. I already have Claude for that if I wanted it. If they're planning to get rid of the ide and make Cursor purely vibe coding, they've lost me as a customer.
Quite honestly, I've turned off almost all of the LLM features in Cursor. No more tab completion. No more agents for little changes. This week, the only code I wrote with agents was low-stakes front end code for our admin panel. Everything else was organic, free range, human-written code. And it's the first time in months I've felt this good about my job. Agents suck the soul out of programming for me by giving a few cheap dopamine hits.
Truth be told, if Cursor removes the vs code bits, I'll probably see what Nova is like, or what Sublime has been up to. Or maybe kick the tires on Zed.
I can't tell you how much it pisses me off when on I click on an article on an english-speaking forum and see a german translation, despite having my browser configured to tell websites that I speak both german and english[1].
Gotta give it to the Cursor team, they must have REALLY good numbers. They raised at a 9.9b valuation less than a year ago and now apparently targeting 50b.
Makes no sense to me, the main driver of codex, Claude code, etc.. seems to be fixed cost plans that offer reduced token cost. Cursor doesn’t have a good model so they can’t offer that (at least not to the same extent).
If you're in the market, OpenCode is quite good and has become my daily driver. You may also consider pi[0], but that's (from what I've heard) more agenty.
I only used Cursor in short bursts so 20 USD per month was hard to justify. I recently switched to VSCodium + Cline + OpenRouter and I can use any model I want (currently Step 3.5 Flash for "Temu Sonnet"). It scratches the itch very well for me for literal pennies on the dollar.
I should also add: Cline doesn't require any account at all. I just installed the extension and added my OpenRouter API key and that was it.
Devswarm.ai is something worth checking out too. Similar but it has a built in IDE and more tools for multi-agent development. Can manage multiple repos, worktrees and ai agents in one window. They have a free and paid version.
I recently cancelled my cursor subscription (and chatgpt), and went all in on pi.dev.
The thing I've noticed is cursor was better at producing better results with a really shitty prompt.
That said, well written prompts on pi.dev seem to be out performing anything I ever tried on Cursor. That may just be me, but it's what I've noticed in my work.
This week I had 4 different agents, each with sub agents, all working on different tasks. Mostly greenfield work. My feedback was mostly nitpicky. I was pretty damn impressed
I've mostly switched to claude code ( using the intellij plugin ) since I like the functionality of claude code more. But I will say the one thing i miss is the tab autocomplete cursor has. It looks like they're mostly going in the direction of agentic development though with this which unfortunately doesn't interest me as much but maybe I'm missing out? I've seen a few people tout the power of using multiple agentic models on different git worktrees.
The identity confusion MeetingsBrowser describes is real, but I think there's a coherent product thesis underneath it: Cursor wants to be the surface where you interact with agents, not just the tool where you write code. The problem is that those two things require opposite UX philosophies. Agent-first needs ambient, background autonomy. Code-first needs precise, synchronous control. Trying to do both in one product means you're always making tradeoffs that frustrate one half of your users. Claude Code sidesteps this by not trying to be an IDE at all — it's just an orchestration layer you invoke from wherever you already work.
I used Cursor with Opus but was expensive. I've moved to Zed with Claude max plan and have enjoyed the fast editor and get way more out of my Max plan. Zed offers enough inline suggestions for free.
Funny how in this space, once a company feels dead, you don’t even check out their release if the video looks decent, it would have to be totally revolutionary.
Cursor works better for me than Claude Code. In my opinion, Claude intelligence is too narrow.
Good luck explaining all the details to Claude, it tends to ignore them anyway. Like a middle-level SWE, it's too stubborn to appreciate them, and prefers to blast energy (tokens) on shuffling the lines instead of seeing a bigger picture.
Cursor, in contrast, is a highly educated coder that gets you immediately.
I've got an impression that Claude Code is more oriented on unattended development of CRUD applications, while Cursor is more refined and closer to a senior-level SWE/PhD for productive work in pair.
We liked using Cursor a lot, great developer experience assisted with AI. I am not sure if this is the right direction.
Worth noting, a few weeks ago we got hit with $2500 of unauthorized usage during the weekend. We stopped using it because of security concerns, no 2FA, and some risky defaults: “Only Admins Can Edit Usage Settings” is off by default.
Hard to trust in a team setting without stronger safeguards.
The reason I used cursor, other than it being paid by my employer, is that it had a pretty good integration between IDE and the agent workflow.
If I want to mostly direct 1 or more agents I go straight to claude code (codex at home.)
But I still want to have a IDE at the end of the day, I do look and review the code. I still need to direct it to fix some things it doesn't do properly and I dont feel like giving up my understanding of the system I work with (despite what the vibe people say) I don't think it will lead to good outcomes or any benefit in the name of speed.
So for me this direction goes against what I find useful in cursor, and entirely seems to look out for the the 10+ agents crowd. Which makes sense, these are the guys spending +200 $ subscriptions and so on. I'll go back to Zed + CC or Codex.
By the way their new interface looks just like the Codex App.
I like cursor and its workflow as a tool, but I do wonder whether moving to cloud (I mean for lots of the cool features) will work. Yes we all GET Cursor has to make money. No one is fooled what this is about. It's also fine, the video and screenshot thing is great.
Not clear to me how cursor can remain relevant in the era of agent coding. The main things I care about now are navigation and quick editing. Vanilla VS Code or vim with some extensions does the job for me now.
Me too, I have the bad feeling autocomplete will be sunsetted sooner or later, it clearly isn't the path they're getting into. Also it started to get worse lately, it tries too hard to predict, it wasn't like that some time ago, hopefully you know what I'm saying
I was loving Cursor for the agents and autocomplete which was amazing. When they started talking about the autocomplete being no longer a focus and looking towards these token blackholes I switched back to VSCode. At $10 a month it's even cheaper.
The features here don’t seem game changing. The most compelling parts are mostly already available in Claude or Codex or their related apps and services.
The biggest concern is that if you want to use SOTA models I don’t see how they can match what you get with the subscription plans of Anthropic and Open AI, whether your spending $20 or $200 a month.
Even if they could match what you get in terms of token quantity, they are giving their tools away for free for the foreseeable future and Cursor is not.
Cursor is so good for what I do is that I've cancelled my Cursor subscription and went back to VSCode (w/o Copilot) for the diff review and code navigation.
I left cursor and went back to VS Code b/c the editing experience is basically the same and cursor was adding more and more agentic features which don't appeal to me. I'm a happy Claude Code user and having my code separate from the planning/brainstorming part of the task makes implementing its own step with me driving/writing the code.
Cursor died for me when they star putting limits and time waits everywhere even on more expensive plans.
I totally preferred the other way, but at some point , there is boiler plate or organizations you just want done and it does not make sense to put you waiting minutes a time to confirme few refactors.
That literally killed the vibe for cursor to me
The biggest killer feature Cursor has that so far no one else seems to have is cloud based computer use. It’s such a game changer. You get a walkthrough video instead of just diffs. But as soon as anthropic release it (their computer use is local only, no thanks) I might consider switching though. Mostly due to the subsidized $200 plan.
No they are not. Tired of this 40 year old terminal setback instead of having real and beautiful GUIs. Its fine for some kind of people but don't think what works for you is acceptable for the other 50% of us.
Oh yeah I am not talking about cursor, maybe what it felt like when it was 1.0. There will be a new breed of GUIs for people who don't touch terminals. Opencode web and devin code review have a little glimmer of that but it will probably look very different.
So your company is fine giving access to their entire GitHub to a third party, and being locked into GitHub too?
If their SaaS could work with local only repo setups it would be a better UX...
What is the special sauce of cursor. As a harness I assume it's mostly context management right? And maybe some defensive coding to mitigate probabilistic llms? Is there any big difference between cursor and Claude code?
No per-agent auto-worktree? This is the killer feature of Conductor, having to type `/worktree` into every new chat isn't really a resolution. Not even sure what selecting 'Worktree' for a new chat does
"having to type `/worktree` into every new chat isn't really a resolution"
I don't know what you're talking about. My experience with Cursor (before this new v3) is that new Cursor agent tabs / cloud agents already intelligently manage worktrees to prevent conflicts.
Wow, maybe something is wrong with my setup. In Cursor 3, I am clicking "New Agent" at the top left. My root repository is correctly listed on top of the composer, and I clicked the icon to the right of it and selected 'Worktree'. Then, I instruct the model to run `pwd` and tell me it's git status. It's always just on `main` in my root repository. I dug through the settings and couldn't find anything, and after finding this comment[0] on their forums gave up. Would you mind sharing a bit more about your setup/how it works?
cursor should be advertising multi-model adversarial reviews, I do this all the time and let me tell you things that slip through the cracks when opus or gpt write code that gemini catches are downright scary, on the backend anyway.
I don't understand how this product can be productively useful. It looks like any other AI chat bot, but I remember hearing people speak very positive things about it. What am I missing?
You're missing nothing with this new ui. For me very good autocomplete + stuff than can be automated with an agent on the side while coding on the other was the peak. I want the control, control to activate/disable autocomplete and agents, I don't want to follow an imposed workflow
imo there’s a clear greenfield to have doubled down on where cursor was before in proactively keeping devs appraised of the code that they’re generating, and bridging growing gaps between abstracted chat sessions and files/directory structures I might understand less and less
This on the other hand feels like a clear reaction to cc/codex, in a way that even kind of builds an offboarding ramp?
Maybe I'm old, but I only recently started using Gemini to assist me in coding. Now it seems everyone is heading to giving agents to do the full-blown coding. I guess if the result code is good, it doesn't matter who's coding (me or AI).
But are they affordable already for developers who don't earn a Silicon Valley salary? Developers in 3rd world countries?
I'm not convinced people who are doing real work on production applications with any sizable user base is writing code through only agents. There's no way to get acceptable code from these models without really knowing your code base well and basically doing all the systems thinking for the model.
Your workflow is probably closer to what most SWEs are actually doing.
You really need to keep them on a tight leash, stop and correct them when they start screwing up, and then the remaining 90% of the work starts after they say their done, where you need to review/refactor/replace a lot of what they produced.
The only way you're going to let an agent go off on its own to one-shot a patch is if your quality bar is merely "the code works."
This, at least for me, has changed in the past six months. Which is the same thing people were saying in the months prior to that, so I will accept some eye rolls. But at least for our pretty large monorepo opus + a lot of engineering work on context got us to a point where a large portion of our engineers are doing most of their work with agents first and a lot of back and forth + smaller hand edits.
Not true. As long as you don't blindly accept their garbage and keep things behind sensible interfaces so you can reimplement if necessary, and have good tests you're fine
What is Cursor doing? They need to relax a little bit. Recently I saw they released "Glass" which WAS here: https://cursor.com/glass, now just redirects to /download.
Is "Cursor 3" == Glass? I get they feel like their identity means they need to constantly be pushing the envelope in terms of agent UX. But they could stand to have like an "experimental" track and a "This is VS Code but with better AI integration" track.
Glass was a codename while the UI was in early alpha with testers. It redirects to download now because there is no special link anymore. It's just part of Cursor 3 itself.
So funny , I remember their talk about re-imagining their editor for the future of agents. They end up copying codex gui lol.
These AI companies are running out of ideas, and are desperate.
I can't imagine investing in companies that are 3 month behind open source alternatives, and their target audience being the most experimental kind there is.
so just like how every chat app has to look like slack, every ide has to look like vscode, now every agent workspace has to look like the codex app? codex app, antigravity, and now this all have the exact same UI design...
Cursor seems like far worse value than Codex with a ChatGPT subscription. Doesn't equivalent usage of the $200 subscription cost over $1000? I don't understand why people use it when you can just get multiple Pro subscriptions.
No it's not very good. But when you run out of Claude tokens it's perfectly fine for small stuff.
Cursor's inline autocomplete is very good though, much better than anything I could reproduce in Zed with various 3rd party "edit" LLMs (although checking google, they announced a new model since I tried it https://zed.dev/blog/zeta2)
I ran parallel prompt with composer 2 and gpt5.3 codex. Composer did slightly better, in terms of variable naming and extra tweaks to loosely related files to keep the codeb consistent.
Thought I'd give it a try and installed the latest version. Application crashes at startup on Linux (Wayland) with: "The window terminated unexpectedly (reason: 'crashed', code: '139')".
Probably yet another instance of developers mostly testing and doing quality assurance on macOS/Windows.
Hey, sorry about that! Some AUR packages share cursor in a way that isn't forward+backwards compatible across releases. We recommend using our official AppImage from https://cursor.com/download Alternatively, please use a different AUR package that doesn't have these issues https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/cursor-nightly-bin
I prefer to avoid AppImages if I can but I gave it a try anyway and it still fails with exactly the same error. What made you think it's just a packaging issue?
I was a long time (relative to AI age) Cursor fan but have since abandoned it for Claude Code. Working on mostly php/laravel/js/vue stack the difference in the quality of models is insane. No other model can really compete with Opus, and using it through Cursor is just insanely expensive.
So while the Cursor AI is great, especially for reviewing generated code, it just can't compete.
I prefer cli based coding agents (Codex or Claude Code). I use wezterm and tmux, split my screen, open neovim on the left, lazygit below neovim, my coding agent on the right.
Cursor seem to selectively changed some plans. I use the $20 plan both at work and at home.
Ar work I am still on 500 fast requests plan, so I can use quite some Opus 4.6 requests, but at home my quota is finished after about 14 Opus requests.
For my personal use, I will probably switch to Forge Code or Pi and MiniMax 2.6, GLM 5.1 or Qwen 3.6.
Damnit, now I probably have to update my vscode plugin to support Cursor 3... I mean have a coffee or go for a swim while waiting on AI to update my vscode plugin to support Cursor 3. :P
I really dislike this push away from augmentation and towards agents. I get that people want to be lazy and just have the LLM do all of their work, but using the AI as an augmentation means you are the driver and can prevent it from making mistakes, and you still have knowledge of the codebase. I think there is so much more we could be doing in the editor with AI, but instead every company just builds a chatbot. Sigh.
Wow, really negative comments here! I'm not a cursor user, and I can't say I love the look of this UI, but my team and I are very heavy users of https://www.conductor.build . Managing many agents, each in their own sandbox, felt like indisputably the future after using conductor for a day. We were a cursor company before conductor, but we cancelled all our seats around the time Opus 4.6 dropped because conductor was vastly more productive. So IMO, Cursor is definitely moving in the right direction w/ this -- the days of the IDE are numbered & they're correctly designing for the future.
For me, there's no way to get into a flow state if I'm thinking about terminal windows and Claude Code. Even before conductor dropped on our team, I'd been building CLIs to spin up agent sandboxes on work trees -- but that still required a lot of terminal window management.
My work now is usually:
- 1 hard task (hard to think about more than 1 of these at once) -- localized to a sandbox, but with multiple agents in different convo threads
- N simpler tasks (usually 4-8). These are usually one-shottable. They're a pleasure to come up with & ship.
I'm thinking about and managing the hard task. When it's cooking for more than 10 seconds, I'm switching to an ez task and pushing them along.
Just like OG coding -- hard to be in a flow state every day. But when it works, you can get an unbelievable amount of work done.
I'll be walking around now, and I'll add voice notes of little tasks or cleanups I want to throw an agent at when I get home. Good products are made of 1000s of small, good decisions -- and now those are free to implement, the slowest part is writing them down as tickets.
I've been running Claude Code in my Cursor IDE for a while now via extension. I like the setup, and I direct Claude on one task at a time, while still having full access to my code (and nice completions via Cursor). I still spend time tweaking, etc. before committing. I have zero interest in these new "swarms of agents" they are trying to force on us from every direction. I can barely keep straight my code working on one feature at a time. AI has greatly helped me speed that up, but working serially has resulted in the best quality for me. I'll likely drop Cursor for good now and switch back to vanilla VsCode with CC.
I just wish Claude code would also offer fast inline auto complete. Sometimes I’ll just want to have a function definition or some boilerplate spelled out without waiting for the slow Claude response. Or actively switching models. ——- Maybe I can set up a shortcut for that?
Is there a significant difference between Claude Code in VSCode and Copilot in VSCode? I’ve been using Copilot with the Claude models (including Sonnet/Opus 4.6) and it seems to work spectacularly.
My subscription is only $10 a month, and it has unlimited inline suggestions. I just wonder if I’m missing anything.
> Is there a significant difference between Claude Code in VSCode and Copilot in VSCode? I’ve been using Copilot with the Claude models (including Sonnet/Opus 4.6) and it seems to work spectacularly.
Most models are limited to 200k context in GitHub Copilot. The Claude models are now 1M context elsewhere.
Copilot just sucks . I’ve tried them both and I stick with cc and codex mcp
I tried copilot for a bit in vscode as well with opus and felt something was off. Somehow as if copilots harness around it just wasn’t as good. But I can’t give solid prove.
Can't you use the official claude code vs plugin? AFAIK it uses the same binary as the cli in the background.
Yes and I do. My above point was just that I’d like to have fast inline auto complete.
The $10/month plan offers a quite limited number of tokens for advanced models. And if you are not careful and set the model to Auto it will quickly deplete them.
Not a real solution but you could try using AquaVoice for dictation. It can gather screen context so you just say the function name out loud and it capitalizes and spells everything correctly. (Even hard cases!)
This. I have effectively used multiple agents to do large refactors. I have not used them for greenfield development. How are folks leveraging the agentic swarm, and how are you managing code quality and governance? Does anyone know of a site that highlights code, features, or products produced by this type of development?
I think it would be fantastic to have a reference site for significant, complex projects either developed or substantially extended primarily via agent(s). Every time I look at someone's incredible example of a workflow for handling big context projects, it ends up being a greenfield static microblog example with vague, arm-wavey assertions that it will definitely scale.
Same here. And just recently made the switch back to VS Code with CC
Also means you don't have to deal with Cursor's busted VS Code plugins due to licensing or forking drift (e.g. Python intellisence, etc)
Same setup here. Claude Code in the terminal, one task at a time. The swarm thing never clicked for me. When I'm building I need to hold the full context in my head, and watching the agent work is actually part of that. I catch things I missed in my own prompt while it's thinking. Parallelizing that would just mean reviewing code I have no mental model for. Serial is slower on paper but the code actually works at the end. I think these products are trying to capture no-coders, which is a recipe for disaster. They're trying to create architectures so people can say "build me X" and the agents perform magic end-to-end, output a hot pile of garbage. The actual value here is taking the finger-to-keyboard burden off the user and abstracting up to architect level. That means you still need to be able to review the goddamn code and offer an opinion on it to end up with something good. AI slop comes from people who don't have the skills and context to offer any valuable opinion or pushback to the AI. Vanilla CC is the best IMO.
Try Zed instead of VSC. Thank me later.
I did, but having the buttons on the bottom vs the side is a deal breaker for me, esp. since they are VERY tiny on my 4K screen. I can barely even get my mouse over them, and it seems they aren't movable to the left side like VSC? Am I missing something? Hard to believe this shipped, it is unusable for me.
>I have zero interest in these new "swarms of agents"
I think you misunderstand "swarms of agents", based on what you say above. An agent swarm, in my understanding and checked via a google search, does not imply working on multiple features at one time.
It is working on one feature with multiple agents taking different roles on that task. Like maybe a python expert, a code simplifier, a UI/UX expert, a QA tester, and a devils advocate working together to implement a feature.
They’re not experts.
Sensitive but uninformed. Expert is a common AI concept, going back for decades. It wasn’t invented with LLM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system
That’s totally what they were talking about.
What do you mean, my prompts specifically ask for a phd level expert in every field?
\s
"Expertise" is a completely different beast from "knowledge".
Expecting to gain it from a model only through prompting is similar to expecting to become capable of something only because you bought a book on the topic.
This was sarcasm, sorry if that wasn’t clear.
> does not imply working on multiple features at one time.
How can multiple parallel agents some local and some in the cloud be working on a single task?
How can:
> All local and cloud agents appear in the sidebar, including the ones you kick off from mobile, web, desktop, Slack, GitHub, and Linear. (From the announcement, under “Run many agents in parallel”)
…be working on the same task?
Subagents are different, but the OP is not confused about what cursor is pushing, and it is not what you describe.
Same way a developer and designer can work on the same feature during the same week? Or two developers working on the same feature during the same week. They can have a common api contract and then one builds the frontend and the other works on the backend.
They are confused in the word they use: the article on what Cursor is pushing does not, according to ^F, mention "swarm" at all. Since we have a word for multiple agents working on one task, it is probably best not to use that word if you are referring to multiple agents working on multiple tasks, right?
I bring it up not to be pedantic, but because if you think it implies multi-tasking and dismiss it, you are missing out on it's ability to help in single-tasking.
I think cursor doesn't make distinction between single or multiple logical tasks for swarm-like workloads. Subagents is the word they use for the swarm workers.
Fwiw when I select multiple models for a prompt it just feeds the same prompt to them in parallel (isolated worktrees), this isn't the same as the swarm pattern in 2.4+ (default no worktrees).
> I bring it up not to be pedantic
The OP is fundamentally expressing the opinion that single task threads are easier to keep track of.
Agree / disagree? Sure.
…but dipping into pedantry about terms (swarm, subagent, vine coding, agentic engineering) really doesn't add anything to the conversation does it?
You said:
> I think you misunderstand "swarms of agents", based on what you say above.
…but from reading the entire post I am pretty skeptical anyone was confused as to what they meant.
Wrong term? Don't care. If someone calls it a hallucination? Also don't care.
That cursor is focusing on “do stuff in parallel guys!”? Yeah, I care about that.
> it is probably best not to use that word if you are referring to multiple agents working on multiple tasks, right?
Not relevant to the thread. Also, I work with people who casually swap between using these exact words to mean both things.
I donnnt caarrrrre what people call it.
…when the meaning is obvious from the context, it doesnt matter.
Subagents are isolated context windows, which means they cannot get polluted as easily with garbage from the main thread. You can have multiple of them running in parallel doing their own separate things in service of whatever your own “brain thread”… it’s handy because one might be exploring some aspect of what you are working on while another is looking at it from a different perspective.
I think the people doing multiple brain threads at once are doing that because the damn tools are so fucking slow. Give it little while and I’m sure these things will take significantly less time to generate tokens. So much so that brand new bottlenecks will open up…
This flow feels so slow after switching to Conductor and running X number of tasks in separate git workspaces concurrently
Have you tried Devswarm.ai yet? It's similar but can use VS Code workflows.
I'll check it out, thanks
Same here. Tried agent system but no. One feature. One conversation.
> have zero interest in these new "swarms of agents" they are trying to force on us from every direction.
Good for you! Personally waiting for one agent to do something while I shove my thumb up my butt just waiting around for it to generate code that I'll have to fix anyway is peak opposite of flow state, so I've eagerly adopted agents (how much free will I had in that decision is for philosophers to decide) so there's just more going on so I don't get bored. (Cue the inevitable accusations of me astroturfing or that this was written by AI. Ima delve into that one and tell there was not. Not unless you count me having stonks in the US stock market as being paid off by Big AI.)
I have personally found that I cannot context switch between thinking deeply about two separate problems and workstreams without a significant cognitive context-switching cost. If it's context-switching between things that don't require super-deep thought, it's definitely doable, but I'm still way more mentally burnt-out after an hour or two of essentially speed-running review of small PRs from a bunch of different sources.
Curious to know more about your work:
Are your agents working on tangential problems? If so, how do you ensure you're still thinking at a sufficient level of depth and capacity about each problem each agent is working on?
Or are they working on different threads of the same problem? If so, how do you keep them from stepping on each other's toes? People mention git worktrees, but that doesn't solve the conflict problem for multiple agents touching the same areas of functionality (i.e. you just move the conflict problem to the PR merge stage)
This is a struggle I've also been having.
It's easier when I have 10 simple problems as a part of one larger initiative/project. Think like "we had these 10 minor bugs/tweaks we wanted to make after a demo review". I can keep that straight. A bunch of agents working in parallel makes me notably faster there though actually reviewing all the output is still the bottleneck.
It's basically impossible when I'm working on multiple separate tasks that each require a lot of mental context. Two separate projects/products my team owns, two really hard technical problems, etc. This has been true before and after AI - big mental context switches are really expensive and people can't multitask despite how good we are at convincing ourselves we can.
I expect a lot of folks experience here depends heavily on how much of their work is the former vs the later. I also expect that there's a lot of feeling busy while not actually moving much faster.
> I also expect that there's a lot of feeling busy while not actually moving much faster.
Hey don’t say that too loudly, you’ll spook people.
With less snark, this is absolutely true for a lot of the use I’m seeing. It’s notably faster if you’re doing greenfield from scratch work though.
Once I started agents and Claude code hid more and more of the changes it did from me it all went downhill..
Yes, also doesn't work for me. If the changes are simple, it is fine but if the changes are complex and there isn't a clear guideline then there is no AI that is good enough or even close to it. Gives you a few days of feeling productive and then weeks of trying to tidy up the mess.
Also, I have noticed, strangely, that Claude is noticeably less compliant than GPT. If you ask a question, it will answer and then try to immediately make changes (which may not be related). If you say something isn't working, it will challenge you and it was tested (it wasn't). For a company that is seems to focus so much on ethics, they have produced an LLM that displays a clear disregard for users (perhaps that isn't a surprise). Either way, it is a very bad model for "agent swarm" style coding. I have been through this extensively but it will write bad code that doesn't work in a subtle way, it will tell that it works and that the issues relate to the way you are using the program, and then it will do the same thing five minutes later.
The tooling in this area is very good. The problem is that the AI cannot be trusted to write complex code. Imo, the future is something like Cerbaras Code that offers a speed up for single-threaded work. In most cases, I am just being lazy...I know what I want to write, I don't need the AI to do it, and I am seeing that I am faster if I just single-thread it.
Only counterpoint to this is that swarms are good for long-running admin, housekeeping, etc. Nowhere near what has been promised but not terrible.
I tried swarms as well, but I came back to you as well. It’s not worth it even th e small worse description double-checking, fine-tuning is not worth the effort the worse code will cost me in the future. Also when I don’t know about it.
How does one work with a team of developers to solve larger problems? You break down the problems into digestible chunks and have each teammate tackle a stack of those tasks.
Its far closer to being a project manager than it is being a solo developer.
It's not that difficult. You get it to work on one deep problem, then another does more trivial bug fixes/optimizations, etc. Maybe in another you're architecting the next complex feature, another fixes tests, etc etc
> Personally waiting for one agent to do something while I shove my thumb up my butt just waiting around for it to generate code that I'll have to fix anyway
I spend that time watching it think and then contemplating the problem further since often, as deep and elaborate as my prompts are, I've forgotten something. I suspect it might be different if you are building something like a CRUD app, but if you are building a very complicated piece of software, context switching to a new topic while it is working is pretty tough. It is pretty fast anyway and can write the amount of code I would normally write in half a day in like 15 minutes.
In my workflow, it's totally interactive: Give the LLM some instructions, wait very briefly, look at code diff #1, correct/fix it before approving it, look at code diff #2, correct/fix it before approving it, sometimes hitting ESC and stopping the show because the agent needs to be course corrected... It's an active fight. No way I'm going to just "pre-approve all" and walk away to get coffee. The LLMs are not ready for that yet.
I don't know how you'd manage a "swarm" of agents without pre-approving them all. When one has a diff, do you review it, and then another one comes in with an unrelated diff, and you context switch and approve that, then a third one comes in with a tool use it wants to do... That sounds absolutely exhausting.
It sounds like diff #2 depends on approval of diff #1? But with cursor it's a set of diffs that'll be retroactively approved or rejected one by one. So you can get coffee during the thinking and still have interactive checks. Swarm changes nothing about this, except affecting the thinking time.
I find it puzzling whenever someone claims to reach "flow" or "zen state" when using these tools. Reviewing and testing code, constantly switching contexts, juggling model contexts, coming up with prompt incantations to coax the model into the right direction, etc., is so mentally taxing and full of interruptions and micromanagement that it's practically impossible to achieve any sort of "flow" or "zen state".
This is in no way comparable to the "flow" state that programmers sometimes achieve, which is reached when the person has a clear mental model of the program, understands all relevant context and APIs, and is able to easily translate their thoughts and program requirements into functional code. The reason why interrupting someone in this state is so disruptive is because it can take quite a while to reach it again.
Working with LLMs is the complete opposite of this.
Thank you so much. These comments let me believe in my sanity in an over-hyped world.
I see how people think its more productive, but honestly I iterate on my code like 10-15 times before it goes into production, to make sure it logs the right things, it communicates intent clearly, the types are shared and defined where they should be. It’s stored in the right folder and so on.
Whilst the laziness to just pass it to CC is there I feel more productive writing it on my own, because I go in small iterations. Especially when I need to test stuff.
Let’s say I have to build an automated workflow and for step 1 alone I need to test error handling, max concurrency, set up idempotency, proper logging. Proper intent communication to my future self. Once I’m done I never have to worry about this specific code again (ok some error can be tricky to be fair), but often this function is just practically my thought and whenever i need it. This only works with good variable naming and also good spacing of a function. Nobody really talks about it, but if a very unimportant part takes a lot of space in a service it should be probably refactored into a smaller service.
The goal is to have a function that I probably never have to look again and if I have to do it answers me as fast as possible all the questions my future self would ask when he’s forgotten what decisions needed to be made or how the external parts are working. When it breaks I know what went wrong and when I run it in an orchestration I have the right amount of feedback.
As others I could go very long about that and I’m aware of the other side of the coin overengineering, but I just feel that having solid composable units is just actually enabling to later build features and functionality that might be moat.
Slow, flaky units aren’t less likely to become an asset..
And even if I let AI draft the initial flow, honestly the review will never be as good as the step by step stuff I built.
I have to say AI is great to improve you as a developer to double check you, to answer (broad questions), before it gets to detailed and you need to experiment or read docs. Helps to cover all the basics
So don't write slow flakey unit tests? Or better yet, have the AI make them not slow and not flakey? Of if you wanna be old school, figure out why they're flakey yourself and then fix it? If it's a time thing then fix that or if it's a database thing then mock the hell out of that and integration test, but at this point if your tests suck, you only have yourself to blame.
Sorry I don’t get your point and you didn’t seem to get mine.
I’m saying I would guess I’m faster building manually then to let AI write it, arguably it won’t even achieve the level I feel best with in the future aka the one having the best business impact to my project.
Also the way I semantically define unit tests is that they are instant and non-flaky as they are deterministic else it would be a service for me.
I switched to use LLMs exclusively since around March last year and I haven’t wrote a line of code directly since then.
I have followed the usual autocomplete > VS Code sidebar copilot > Cursor > Claude Code > some orchestrator of multiple Codex/Claude Codes.
I haven’t experienced the flow state once in this new world of LLMs. To be honest it’s been so long that I can’t even remember what it felt like.
LLMs deal with implementation details that get in the way of "flow"
"My flow state is better than yours"? Point is, I get engaged with the thing and lose track of time.
I can lose track of time watching a movie or playing a video game, but it's not what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi would call "flow state", but just immersion.
For my work I’ve never found myself sitting around with nothing to do because there’s always so much review of the generated code that needs to be done
The only way I can imagine needing to run multiple agents in parallel for code gen is if I’m just not reviewing the output. I’ve done some throwaway projects where I can work like that, but I’ve reviewed so much LLM generated code that there is no way I’m going to be having LLMs generate code and just merge it with a quick review on projects that matter. I treat it like pair programming where my pair programmer doesn’t care when I throw away their work
Why is this comment so pale I cat read it? What’s the contrast on this is this accessible to anyone?
I’m guessing it was downvoted by the masses but at the same time I’d like the choice to be able to read it I’m not that into what the general public think about something.
I’m getting into downmaxxing at this point. I love that you have to earn being negative on this site. Give it to me.
Click on the timestamp link to go to the comment's own page where it will be rendered black instead of gray.
Except it isn't (anymore)? Timestamp + reader mode worked though.
Edit: it is black if logged in, gray if logged out. Weird.
You are falling behind if you're not pushing yourself to learn and get better orchestrating multiple agents.
Why is it that every legitimate concern or downside pointed out about AI is met with the same tired, low signal, rebuttal of FOMO.
It's become the "no u r" argument of the AI age... :/
Because the AI apologists cannot deal with the much studied and proven placebo effect of perceived increased productivity, so they have to try and make themselves feel better by claiming that others are lagging behind in a race no one else is really interesting in running.
A snake oil scheme if ever saw one.
Cursor has been my main AI tool for over a year now.
I've been trying to use Claude Code seriously for over a month, but every time I do it, I get the impression that it would take me less work to do with Cursor.
I'm on the enterprise plan, so it can get pricey. This is why I used to stick mostly to auto mode.
Now Composer 2 has taken over as my default model. It is not as intelligent as OpenAI's or Anthropic's flagship models, but I feel it has as good as or better intuition. With way better pricing. It can get stuck in more complex tasks though.
Being able to get in the loop, stop and instruct or change models makes all the difference. And that is why I've stayed in the editor mode until now. Let's see if 3.0 changes that.
I was a Cursor loyal until I was spending around $2k a week with premium models and my team had a discussion about whether we’d want to use more Cursor over hire another engineer. We unanimously agreed we’d rather hire another team member. I’m more productive than ever but I’m burning out.
Anyway, as a result, I switched to Claude Code Max and I am equally as prolific and paying 1/10th the price. I get my cake and to eat it, too. *Note there’s a Cursor Ultra, which at quick glance seems akin to Claude Code Max. Notice that both are individual plans, I believe I’m correct you benefit from choosing those token-wise over a team or enterprise plan?
Anyway, you’re right Claude Code is less ergonomic; generally slower. I was losing my mind over Opus in Cursor spinning up subagents. I don’t notice that happen nearly as frequently in Claude Code itself. I think it has to do with my relatively basic configuration. CC keeps getting better the more context I feed it though, which is stuff like homegrown linters to enforce architecture.
All to say, Cursor’s pricing model is problematic and left a bad taste in my mouth. Claude Code seems to need a bunch of hand holding at first to be magical. Pick your poison
There’s a reason it’s 10x cheaper. You’ll be paying the real price after the subsidies end.
> Anyway, you’re right Claude Code is less ergonomic; generally slower.
The secret in my experience is parallelization - Cursor might be faster or have better ergo for a single task, but Claude Code really shines when you have 6 tasks that are fairly independent.
If you treat CC as just another terminal tool and heavily use git worktrees, the overall productivity shoots through the window. I've been using a tool called Ouijit[1] for this (disclosure: the dev is an old colleague of mine), and I genuinely do not think I could go back to using Cursor or any other traditional IDE+agent. I barely even open the code in an editor anymore, primarily interacting through the term with Vim when I need to pull the wires out.
[1]: https://github.com/ouijit/ouijit
Cursor can do that well too. Their code review feature usually gives a handful of independent feedbacks. I just trigger agents independently for all of those. Other integrations with Linear and Slack are also very handy to getting into this workflow. Seems like the 3.0 version is aiming at getting better at this use case.
FWIW I'm not saying Cursor is not capable of this, but that all of the 'Cursor' bits are superfluous, and using tools that bring you closer to the 'bare metal' of the terminal actually give you both more flexibility (I can run Claude Code, Crush, Codex, OpenCode, etc) and remove an entire layer of abstraction that I believe hinders a devs ability to really go all in on agentic engineering.
I started using Cursor and it was my daily driver for a year or two, but I haven't looked back once in regret moving more towards a terminal focused workflow. (Not to mention the pricing of Cursor being absolutely abysmal as well, although often comped by employers)
You do know they have an agent that runs in the terminal, right?
I think intellij idea can git worktree for agents as well.
long term claude code user here, never used cursor, however based on my limited experience, it seems codex can code better than claude code.
I've been using Codex since before ChatGPT (the OG version) and CC since launch. For me personally - Claude Code with Opus/Sonnet generally has better taste, more personality in interactions, and is more willing to just do the work. Paired with skills, LSPs, linters, and hooks, it works very well. I think of the two like this:
Claude Code with Opus/Sonnet is the L7 senior engineer still gunning for promotion. Hasn't hit burnout, hasn't been ground down by terrible teams yet. Capable and willing to get their hands dirty. Codex (the harness) with GPT-5.4 or 5.3-codex is fantastic but terse. Some of the UX frustrates me. I want a visual task list. That said, Codex as a harness is phenomenal. Think of it as the senior EM / CTO-in-waiting who won't write new code without complaining and nitpicking for hours. But they'll thoroughly tear your code apart and produce a plan you can execute yourself or pass to Claude Code.
Both are great, and so is Factory Droid. Also worth checking out Compound Engineering from Every.to if you haven't.
here is example of project i worked using codex, it took 10 iterations just to get github actions right https://github.com/newbeelearn/whisper.cpp . you can see the commits made by codex. Project was quite simple it needs to modify whisper to add support for transcribing voice with start/stop keys and copy the transcription to clipboard when stopped. That's it. It performs poorly as compare to CC which gets it right in one shot.
There is no Max sub for enterprise AFAIK, are you using a private plan for work?
Yes. This seemed to be more cost effective.
It is. Those plans are probably priced at marginal cost. Enterprise is 4x the cost or more.
The workflow that got me into Cloud Code was instructing it that whenever I create a new feature or bug, it should make a new git worktree. And then when I'm done, merge that back to main and delete the worktree. That enables me to open up three plus different Cloud Code's and work on three different things at the same time. As long as they're not directly overlapping, it works great.
I find it interesting that you are on the enterprise plan and are not default willing to pay more for more intelligence. Most people I know who are on the enterprise plan are wishing there existed a 2x intelligent model with 2x price.
My company is going through the exact opposite, so it kinda depends on the company. We are actively encouraging our devs to NOT use Cursor because of how much more expensive it is compared to other tools we have from our calculations and they even considered dropping Cursor at contract renewal altogether due to their costs being higher than other tools.
2x intelligence != 2x results
most tasks I can do better and faster with composer 2
a fellow engineer reported a bug on a code I had written a few months back. I used his report as prompt for composer 2, gpt-5.4-high and claude-4.6-opus-max-thinking. composer found the issue spot on. gpt found another possible vector a couple of minutes later, but a way less likely one and one that would eventually self heal (thus not actually reproducing what we observed on production). claude had barely started when the other two had finished
also, i don't have a budget per se. but it is expected that i over deliver if i'm over spending
Because they are twice as stupid.
the only guy in my whose code has more problems than others is the one who who uses cursor, am I missing something?
I echo the others' sentiments that I still strongly prefer to write code mostly manually, assisted by Tab completions, and only generate piecewise via Cmd+K where I'm not sure about APIs or forgot the exact syntax. Chatting in Ask only mode about more complex problems.
Maybe I'm not a 10x developer, I'm fine with that.
Cursor shoving Agents down my throat made me abandon and cancel it once this year. I jumped around between Sublime, Zed, VS Code, and alas none of them has a Tab completion experience that even remotely compares with Cursor, so I had to switch back.
If possible, I'll probably stay on v2 until it's deprecated. Hope Zed catches by that time.
Try Mercury by Inception. It's available as autocomplete in Zed. Last time I tried it, Zed had an API key hidden in their docs that allowed you to use it for free
The crazy thing is that it's a diffusion-based LLM. That makes it very fast, like Cursor Tab, and the outputs seem very accurate in my limited testing (although I find Cursor Tab to still feel "like 10% better")
---
That said, you should really give agentic coding a la Claude Code a try. It's gotten incredibly good. I still need to check the outputs of course, but after using it for 2-3 days, I've learned to "think" about how to tackle a problem with it similarly like I had to learn when first picking up programming.
Once I did, suddenly it didn't feel risky and weird anymore, because it's doing what I would've done manually anyways. Step by step. It might not be as blackboxy as you think it is
You might want to try this, one step ahead of Ctrl+K
Define the interface and functions and let the AI fill in the blanks.
Eg: I want XYZ class with methodFoo and methodBar which connects to APIabcd and fetch details. Define classes for response types based on API documentation at ...., use localLibraryXYZ for ABCD.
This is the way I found to work well for me. I maintain a tight grip over the architecture, even the low level architecture, and LLM writes code I can't be bothered to write.
I find tab completions very irritating. They're "almost" correct but miss some detail. I'd rather review all of that at once rather than when writing code.
how did Cursor shove agents down your throat? Even in this new version it's basically just VSCode with an optional agent sidebar
Unfortunately, I think Cursor is making progressively more difficult to use other AI provider via extension, mostly due to the fact that they are reserving the secondary sidebar for their own chat interface. This makes it super unpractical to use the Codex and Claude extension, as now they all need to share the primary sidebar. (Before it was not optimal, but it was at least possible.)
As many have pointed out, the cost of token via Cursor is prohibitive compared to having a CC or Codex subscription, so I think the new update brings little to current users, but reduces Cursor's usability.
I think Cursor should go in the direction of embracing other provider's extensions and go for a more integrated and customizable IDE, rather than a one-solution-fits-all kind of an approach. Today I opened VSC again after a log time.
I mean it makes sense for them to be somewhat antagonistic towards these flows because every time you use a different agentic extension or tool inside of Cursor, Cursor loses your money and data.
They're also churning with enterprise customers because for lots of customers on next contract renewal their pricing is increasing like 4-8x (depending on usage patterns but this was what we calculated for most of our devs) because they are slowly moving enterprise customers to usage based only plus a surcharge per million tokens, which they already did with personal sub customers, and all of the latest models are becoming Max mode only. My company is currently going through this and we've committed to way less spend with Cursor for our renewal and are signing with Anthropic and telling devs to prefer using claude code instead. I wouldn't be surprised if next year we cancel altogether and tell all devs to go back to VSCode or some other preferred editor.
I don't see a world where Cursor continues to be viable for 5-10 more years. Lots of people were originally saying "the moat is not in being an model provider" for agentic tools and thats turning out to be very much false in my opinion at least if you care about being a business.
yeah good point. I think this is to be seen though. Right now AI tokens, especially via OpenAI/Anthropic subscriptions, are heavily subsidized. If token cost between the API and subscriptions should even out though, then I think Cursor might well be back in the race.
I use Zed. Much less user hostile.
I wanted to like zed, but then I discovered it is limited to one concurrent agent tab and that is a dealbreaker..
It's open source, so you could try to have your agents patch it! You can also just load up agents in terminal tabs.
I don't use concurrent agents much though so I can't really relate.
The premise of Zed is quite appealing, but I'm not sure I'm ready to switch due to the missing extension ecosystem of VSC. For example, at the moment I'm using the Playwright and Vite ones to quickly run and debug tests.
Zed is incredible, such a relief
How does Zed compare to let's say vsc
Hard to say. I haven't launched VS Code or any of its derivatives since I first used Zed.
I used to have a pro-cursor subscription, but it was way too expensive because I'd always hit my limit. I realized I could just use claude code + the free version of cursor for autocomplete and it worked even better. At this point, I'm not understanding the value that cursor is bringing. A souped up claude code? All I have to do is wait a few months and anything useful will be in claude code or codex or whatever.
So unfortunately this is it for me too. I liked Cursor as a tool, but when i switched to Claude I realized i was getting WAY better value for money. I spent $1800 the month before, i spent $200 the next.
I'm now switching between Claude and Codex for less than 1/4 of what I was spending in December.
Yeah, I tried using their Composer model (which I guess is Kimi) and it just feels sub-Sonnet to me. Whereas a Claude Max sub gets me more Opus than I can use in a month.
Which sucks because Cursor is clearly better than Anthropic at building UIs. CC desktop is buggy af.
Codex is nearly Opus level though. Anyone know if OpenAI permits Max subs to be used in Cursor?
Man, I wish they'd keep the old philosophy of letting the developer drive and the agent assist.
I feel like this design direction is leaning more towards a chat interface as a first class citizen and the code itself as a secondary concern.
I really don't like that.
Even when I'm using AI agents to write code, I still find myself spending most of my time reading and reasoning about code. Showing me little snippets of my repo in a chat window and changes made by the agent in a PR type visual does not help with this. If anything, it makes it more confusing to keep the context of the code in my head.
It's why I use Cursor over Claude Code, I still want to _code_ not just vibe my way through tickets.
My guess would be this is less driven by product philosophy, more driven by trying to maximise chances of a return on a very large amount of funding in an incredibly tough market up against formidable, absurdly well-funded competitors.
It's a very tough spot they're in. They have a great product in the code-first philosophy, but it may turn out it's too small a market where the margins will just be competed away to zero by open source, leaving only opportunity for the first-party model companies essentially.
They've obviously had a go at being a first-party model company to address this, but that didn't work.
I think the next best chance they see is going in the vibe-first direction and trying to claim a segment of that market, which they're obviously betting could be significantly bigger. It's faster changing and (a bit) newer and so the scope of opportunity is more unknown. There's maybe more chances to carve out success there, though honestly I think the likeliest outcome is it just ends up the same way.
Since the beginning people have been saying that Cursor only had a certain window of time to capitalise on. While everyone was scrambling to figure out how to build tools to take advantage of AI in coding, they were one of the fastest and best and made a superb product that has been hugely influential. But this might be what it looks like to see that window starting to close for them.
> It's a very tough spot they're in.
It's a very tough spot they put themselves into. If the goal wasn't to get filthy rich quick it would probably be possible to make a good product without that tough spot.
Products don't live because they're good. They live because they provide value for a short amount of time.
Nothing lives forever. The life of a product is short and over in the blink of an eye.
They're playing this game optimally for their present station.
Slow coding an IDE? We might not even have IDEs in six years.
As these products mature people are going to see more of this stuff. These are the contours of the market. The technology is incredible but it’s still subservient to the economics of building products.
It’s the “why can’t Facebook just show me a chronological feed of people I follow”. Because it’s not in their interests to do so.
Yeah, and just like all social media platforms adopted short form video sooner or later they are going to give in to what consumers pay for (in attention or money). Right now it's anyone's guess what that might be in the context of software development.
It's heartbreaking to write this, but I think Cursor will be remembered as the Lotus 1-2-3 of AI coding.
It is interesting that i find composer to be one of my favorites as while it is a bit dumb it is about 100x faster than the fat boys.
Sometimes u need the beef of opus but 80% composer is plenty.
I have been on the fence if I think composer is useful, but the speed argument is one I hadn’t really considered. I use cursor with Opus almost exclusively but the other day I tried using OpenCode locally with a 6-bit quantized version of Qwen 3.5 and holy crap the speed and latency were mind blowing. Even if not quite as sharp as big boi Opus and the gang.
Now you’ve got me thinking I should give composer another go because speed can be pretty darn great for more generic, basic, tasks.
Tried the cursor a few times, apart from a fancy layer on top of VS Code, it is way too expensive to use, it runs out of credit in a few tasks. On the other hand, vs code with copilot is slower and less 'intelligent', but it lasts longer, I get more work done with it. Recently, started using opencode inside vs code, it is similar to claude code, but needs some better integration with vs code.
> They've obviously had a go at being a first-party model company to address this, but that didn't work.
I thought there was an entire initiative to build their own coding model and the fine tunes of in Composer 1.5 and Composer 2 were just buying them time and training data
You know, it’s stuff like this making me think maybe the anti capitalists have a point.
A company makes a popular product customers like, but to satisfy the VCs the company must make a product the customers don’t like but could make the VCs more money.
Not sure this is the “invisible hand” Adam Smith had in mind.
"Invisible hand" doesn't force you to take VC funding. You can maintain (and many do) what VCs like to derisively call "lifestyle business". And GNU project somehow wasn't started in Soviet Union either. Editors of both kinds (non-VC funded business and FOSS) are widely available for you to use BTW.
The problems that Cursor is facing are directly resulted by the choices that its founders freely made previously.
Anti-capitalist here: Our point is actually the same point as the one Anti-feudalists had. The consumer hostility observed under capitalism is simply a corollary.
To be fair feudalism (the row-farming kind) kind of collapsed because people found better deals with the rise of trade and mercantilism and such. It wasn’t anything anybody needed to make points over.
IDEs seem headed in the same direction. Seriously, watching Codex rip apart binaries in parallel and Claude go from nothing to app in one prompt, I’m pretty sure there’s no need for me to look at any code. I’m fine using tools that just emit machine code if that’s more efficient.
What if the generated app is sending your sensitive information back to Anthropic?
We most generally lump Mercantilism in with Feudalism. The transition to Capitalism came with the rise of Liberalism (not the American political definition, the political philosophy one), which involved a lot of revolutions.
It is easier to imagine the end of the world then the end of feudalism.
I kind of like the story of how Malthus had his theory of societal collapse because he couldn’t imagine a better system then mercantilism. That societies would rather collapse then to end their colonial monopolies.
I see a similar theory today with around depopulation, that as society gets older and relatively fewer working age people there are, that society would rather collapse then we find a better system then Capitalism.
What system works better when you have a very large number of elderly people who want to retire and very few young people to work?
Socialism, for one.
You still have many people consuming and not producing, and much fewer people producing.
Capitalism or socialism doesn’t change that.
I am sure Malthusians could find similar reasons for why collapse was inevitable as the population grew.
For example I can imagine a young Malthus debating with the elderly Adam Smith, and Smith saying something like: “When societies open up their markets, those big bulk carrying cargo ships will be able to ship the required food to the food scarce areas. And when they do, they will enrich them selves as well as the farmers whom they buy the crops from, as the price of the grain will be much higher in these over-populated regions”.
The young Malthus, however, is not convinced and will reply: „Then the population will still grow, both in that ‘new market’ (as you call it), and among the farmers whom acquire that new wealth; and eventually those farmers will make wars or famine with the neighbors and those merchants over the scars resources. Societal collapse is inevitable.“
(I think I agree), Georgist here, Our point is also that these rent-seeking abilities (something which even the creator of capitalism famously hated the land-lords quite a lot)
This is the issue with something like Cursor and VC's funding because I feel like these private equities essentially seek rent in their own way by hollowing out the products from within, to maximize profits without doing efforts in a manner very similar to Rent-seeking, and most large companies also feel like a rent-seeking on the monopoly that they establish (like google or facebook)
I have made someone who was communist/socialist agree to georgism and I have had someone who was extremely capitalist agree to georgism, and to be honest, whether it be georgism or anti capitalism or socialism, I think that the world just wants a system where a person is treated with dignity within the economic cogs.
My opinion is that as long as we can all agree on the last premise about dignity for individuals within the economic cogs, we can all have meaningful conversations to make that a premise, hopefully a reality.
(I feel like the people who might deny dignity to people within this particular context, have either a bias/incentive to not look towards the problem, or are uninformed, or lack the energy to fight towards change within the system, and more importantly the _hope_ that the future can be better)
I am not hopeful about the current political systems (even around the whole-world at times), I feel like there should be more information and decentralization within politics.
Essentially, politics really just feel unaccountable to me, your vote really stops mattering to politicians if/when money starts talking. But technically, this system can be broken through with enough votes.
I really hope for a future where politics and politicians feel accountable and genuine, maybe even someone from down the street who we can have some chats with to actually know them.
Ironically or unironically, just as how the landlords pushed against Georgism/George within really making political difference, The same is happening right now as well where Online landlord monopolies dictate how people interpret and vote by using their algorithms/influence.
Politics like many other problems feel like a chicken and egg problem, like things work until they don't and things don't work until they do. At a more individual level, stepping outside of most algorithms and the reason why I joined hackernews is for doing something like this, myself.
Anarchist here. I can definitely see the appeal of Georgism. And if we must have a state (while we Anarchist work to dismantle the state apparatus) I am personally not convinced Communism is a superior alternative to Georgism. And I think you could probably convince many anarchists alike (as long as you strategically avoid mentioning the role of the state). And in either case, I will definitely stand next to a Georgist during the revolution in solidarity against Capitalism.
In order to make more money you have to make a product customers want.
No, just a product they'll pay for
Customers aren’t in the habit of paying for things they don’t want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand
You sure about that?
According to the comment I replied to you have to make the product VCs think will make VCs the most money, even if that’s at odds with what your customers are telling you they want.
It is more of a point that it may require leaving your old customers behind and disappointing them in order for you to find the customers you can provide the most value to.
The cancer: growth at every cost or die.
God forbids you make a great product in a specific niche and are happy with the money flowing.
Nope, has to be more.
Yeah, this model where you don't get an editor anymore feels like a step backwards. I don't want to give up LSPs, being able to step into/rename functions and stuff like that. I should still be the one in control of the code - the agent is the assistant, not me.
This is why Zed's direction felt pretty strong to me. Unfortunately their agentic features are kind of stagnating and the ACP extensions are riddled with issues.
We're building DevSwarm, and it's aiming to strike the balance between agentic coding in parallel without losing your IDE. Each workspace (worktree) gets a dedicated vscode instance, and in that instance we make it easy to fire up Claude Code, Codex, etc. Would love to hear if it hits the sweet spot we're going for.
edit: https://devswarm.ai
This is why I use Claude Code though, it pairs well with a regular old text editor (in my case Sublime). I've always had an editor and a terminal open, plugging an AI into my terminal has been a fantastic enhancement to my work without really anything else changing or giving up any control.
I actually run a custom fork of Zed based on their master branch because of how stagnated the built-in agent is. Master branch Zed agent did get sub-agents, parallel threads, better thread management, and worktrees though, and I implemented agent skills and the ability to select which model to use for sub-agents for it. And with those features, I'm fairly satisfied.
Any reason not to use it with the agent client protocol instead?
did you watch the 90 second video in the post? all of this is addressed
No but I have now. It’s hard to tell from that few seconds but it doesn’t look like it’s really putting the developer in the driving seat, just providing a minimal escape hatch for manual edits.
It’s very unfortunate what direction Zed has taken. It was very fast and nice editor, that’s now infected with those “AI” features.
It's still a very nice and fast editor, and you can just switch off those AI features. They're still releasing features and fixes for the non-AI parts.
Agreed completely on this (as a heavy daily user of Cursor). It's been the perfect in-between of coding by hand (never again!) and strictly "vibe coding" for me. Being able to keep my eyes on all the changes in a "traditional" IDE view helps me maintain a mental model of how my systems work.
I'm hoping in this new UI in v3 I can still get that experience (maybe it's just hidden behind a toggle somewhere for power users / not shown off in the marketing materials).
I'm an engineer at Cursor, can try to clarify questions here.
> I wish they'd keep the old philosophy of letting the developer drive and the agent assist. Even when I'm using AI agents to write code, I still find myself spending most of my time reading and reasoning about code.
We very much still believe this, which is why even in this new interface, you can still view/edit files, do remote SSH, go to definition and use LSPs, etc. It's hard to drive and ship real changes without those things in our opinion, even as agents continue to get better at writing code.
> I'm hoping in this new UI in v3 I can still get that experience (maybe it's just hidden behind a toggle somewhere for power users / not shown off in the marketing materials).
This new interface is a separate window, so if you prefer the Cursor 2 style, that continues to exist (and is also getting better).
Once I downloaded it, it made sense. The blog post almost made me cancel my subscription because it seemed to get rid of the IDE entirely.
Great, glad to hear that! Stoked to kick the tires on Cursor 3. Thanks for confirming, leerob!
> We very much still believe this
That's good to hear, I might have jumped a little too quickly in my opinion. It's a bit of a Pavlovian response at this point seeing a product I very much love embrace a giant chat window as a UX redesign haha.
I would love to see more features on the roadmap that are more aligned with users like us that really embrace the Cursor 2 style with the code itself being the focal point. I'm sure there's a lot you can do there to help preserve code mental models when working with agents that don't hide the code behind a chat interface.
> It's been the perfect in-between of coding by hand (never again!) and strictly "vibe coding" for me.
I dont think there is an inbetween. Its really hard to 'keep an eye' on code by casually reading diffs. Eventually it will become vibe coding.
Software engineers are deluding themselves with spec driven, plans, prds whatever nonsense and thinking its not vibecoding.
Why?
Reading diffs is an inescapable skill, needed for evaluating any kind of PR. This just makes it more interactive.
I just use Copilot with VS Code, but my flow is to just ask Claude to make a change across whatever files it needs to touch, then either accept the changes, edit the changes directly, or clarify whatever was different from my expectations.
Reading diffs is central to how I work with these agents.
How would they make money from the tokens then haha? The main revenue driver of these companies is to get people to use more tokens. That’s what they will optimise for. Getting the developers out of the way is the way to do it.
Isn’t Cursor’s business model mostly subscriptions? They’re the ones paying for inference, not the user directly, right? So wouldn’t they be incentivized to minimize token usage per unit of user value, not maximize raw tokens?
It's pay-as-you-go after a certain number of included requests/tokens: https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing
Nope. Enterprise you pay for seat to access all of the enterprise features and then you just pay for tokens as you go. Vast majority of their actual revenue comes from enterprise and their revenue is just api pass through to the model providers.
Does Cursor make money from tokens?
I thought it was primarily a user of Anthropic and OpenAI APIs, so the fewer tokens you use to accomplish a task, the higher their margin.
Gemini is featured just as prominently, and they've most recently been pushing their own model series (Composer).
As a Cursor user who hasn't tried Claude Code yet, am I missing anything? I seem (sometimes) exceptionally productive in it and it's working for me. To my understanding, Claude Code is all terminal, but something like an IDE seems like the better interface to me: I want to see the file system, etc. It seems Cursor doesn't have the mindshare relative to Claude in public discussion spaces.
Claude Code is where you move up one abstraction layer. Almost everyone using it productively has spend a lot of time working on their harness, ensuring that everything is planned out and structured such that all that is left is really type in the code. This typically works without error. Before that, you interact a lot via Claude Code in whatever abstraction you feel is right.
That's basically it. You can review changes afterwards, but that's not the main point of Claude Code. It's a different workflow. It's built on the premise: given a tight and verifiable plan, AI will execute the actual coding correctly. This will work, mostly, if you use the very best models with a very good and very specific harness.
Cursor, same as Copilot, has been used by people who are basically pair programming with the AI. So, on abstraction down.
I have no idea what is better, or faster. I suspect it depends at least on the problem, the AI, and the person.
> Cursor, same as Copilot, has been used by people who are basically pair programming with the AI. So, on abstraction down.
This is not really true anymore.
Cursor has better cloud agents than Claude. The multi-agent experience is better, the worktree management is better. Tagging specific code or files in chat is better.
It's hard for me to express the level of pain and frustration I feel going from Cursor to Claude / Conductor+Claude / Claude Extension for VS Code, Claude in Zed, etc.
Really hoping Claude puts more energy into Cowork as a competitor for Cursor and Codex.
I think you are still speaking in the lower abstraction in terms of zwaps' provided understanding. "Tagging specific code" or "files" is likely the type of interfacing most Claude Code users are _not_ doing.
Instead they are defining architecture through specs and verification-loops and attempting to one-shot solutions fitting clear tests. On reflection, I personally don't have many prompts with CC referencing files or code directly, rather I speak in specifications I can then track to a given instance of work in review.
This isn't to suggest you can't work at this abstraction in cursor or w/e interface, but the features you suggest are hardly relevant to the divide zwaps is identifying.
I feel like perhaps you haven't used Cursor. I use both CC and Cursor extensively and as far as I can tell there is nothing that the CC agent will do that Cursor won't do just as well (often using Opus as the backend) and at the same time I get the advantage of seeing the changes in a full IDE if I want to. Their new agent-forward UI hides the code if you don't want to see it as much, but I and many others think that it giving me a full, colourful graphical editor to view changes in is a huge advantage.
I'm not telling you to go use cursor, just to help clarify that you can drive both solutions with the exact same approach and skillset and get very similar results - the difference is the UI. I personally like being able to paste screenshots into the agent, etc.
Nobody is saying your workflow is wrong, it may even be better. However it is not how people use Claude Code or what its attraction is.
What you mention as advantages and features is not something CC users use or require.
On the other hand, Claude is trained on its harness (all but confirmed by Anthropic) so CC is likely just a bit better at its level of abstraction than in cursor. And at the end, you can’t yet best the subscription.
Cursor does the same stuff but better in my opinion. It’s got an IDE focus but whatever agent pipeline they built is better at coding than Claude’s is and much much faster. I routinely fear for my career while using Cursor, but when I use Claude I wonder what all the hype is about.
That’s not to say Claude sucks, but I think Cursor is really underrated and not well known. I think the IDE focus hurts them with non professional developers, but try using it the same as with Claude and you’ll be surprised, I bet. You can hook it up to GitHub and never touch the IDE if you want to.
So that sounds like Claude Code is an inferior subset of Cursor. That Cursor can work like Claude Code, but Claude Code is lacking Cursor’s editing capabilities.
Yes and no. In principle you are right.
In practice, Claude is trained on its harness and the subscription is priced to best competitors such as Cursor.
This is also why Cursor tries to finetune oss models. Otherwise its performance in the CC flavor of AI coding will just be that bit worse
If you install the VS Code plugin, it's the same editing functionality. Cursor lacks a lot of the tooling in claude code that makes the experience a lot more... solid.
That is my experience currently.
It's always funny to see people's reactions to AI because it's the same they would treat junior engineers if nobody was around to raise an eyebrow. I've had a super micromanager who was absolutely insistent on naming variables and whether the open brackets were on the same line or a new line. I've also had people who just gave me the desired functionality and let me figure out the in-between and put in my own creative features, etc with just slight feedback.
We have OG Cursor for the micromanagers (who want to approve/deny every line) and things like Claude Code for those who are less picky about the how, and able to be amazed at what it creates.
I treat people with respect because they are people. Absolutely not the case for machines.
Yep. Cursor is remote indexing. It allows their agents to fish around in the code base more efficiently. I assume the Claude folks are working on this.
It's good to try Claude Code just so you focus on skills, agents, and CLAUDE.md
Then when you go back to Cursor it will still support all of those things in the settings.
Using Cursor you tend to not think about those as much since Cursor does a lot of it for you as part of the IDE integration. But it's good to refine it your own way.
But for the most part there isn't much difference.
You don't have to stop using the IDE just because you are using Claude Code. Using both at the same time is best of both worlds in my experience.
Claude Code isn't really "all terminal" if you embed that terminal in your IDE. I still use Cursor (for now), but I embed a CC panel via extension. With this launch of Cursor 3, I'll probably get off Cursor for good. I have zero interest in this.
Curious, why cursor for this? VSCode or pretty much pure open source IDE's have CC integration. Or am i missing something?
Probably momentum. It takes some effort to change tooling. This is why Cursor worked so well in the beginning. It just took over from VSCode seamlessly.
As someone whose work enforced a switch from Cursor to Claude Code, I do keep on top of the code by pairing it with an IDE, tracking/viewing changes etc. There's no real obstacle to using an IDE as you normally would, with Claude Code as a sidecar.
I run Claude Code from Zed. Very nice experience.
I tried that for a couple weeks and it's no where near as well integrated as Cursor. I hope they get there though because I like Zed.
Zed plus Claude feels more like using isolated browser extensions instead of something part of the browser (unless you pay for Zeds AI thing then the integration is marginally better).
AI labs think they’re building an autonomous replacement for software engineers, while software engineers see these systems as tools to supplement the process of software engineering.
Yeah that's the disconnect though right? Even with the best frontier models, you need to do a lot of system design work, planning, and reviewing before you can let these models run.
These models are infinitely more effective when piloted by a seasoned software engineer and that will always be the case so long as these models require some level of prompting to function.
Better prompts come from more knowledgeable users, and I don't think we can just make a better model to change that.
The idea we're going to completely replace software engineers with agents has always been delusional, so anchoring their roadmap to that future just seems silly from a product design perspective.
It's just frustrating Cursor had a good attitude towards AI coding agents then is seemingly abandoning that for what's likely a play to appease investors who are drunk on AI psychosis.
Edit: This comment might have come off more callous than I intended. I just really love Cursor as a product and don't want to see it get eaten by the "AI is going to replace everything!" crowd.
AI labs won't replace all of the engineers, while engineers becoming more productive, leads to smaller team sizes.
Smaller teams working on much more diverse set of problems.
The truth is absolutely nobody knows how this will all shake out.
> AI labs think they’re building an autonomous replacement for software engineers
And management everywhere is convinced that thats what they are paying for. My company is replacing job titles with "builder". Apparently these tools will make builder out of paper pushers hiding in corporate beaurcarcy. I am suddenly same as them now per my company managment.
> I still want to _code_ not just vibe my way through tickets.
Now we have 3 ways of coding:
* vim / emacs - full manual
* VSCode / IntelliJ - semi-automatic
* ClaudeCode/Codex/OpenCode/... - fully automated
Cursor can't stay in between
Cursor CLI exist - https://cursor.com/cli
This is how use cursor 99% of the time. The other 1% is in zed.
There are some critical parts of architecture where sometimes I really do need to see the code and even sometimes put a wall around it and tell the agent they can't touch it.
Why?
Are you saying they can’t compete with VS Code in the semi-automatic space?
Saying it can't stay in between is like saying a company can't sell both regular bikes and electric bikes. Or bikes that can do both.
Exactly how I feel. If I wanted this agent-centric view without being able to easily see the code I would be using Claude Code.
I use Cursor because agents are not ready to be the ones driving. I need to drive. I still need to understand all the code (and easily browse it) and keep a close watch over what the AI is doing.
I vibe my way through my ideas. I look at LLM code sometimes to cry and cringe and then I beg LLM to have basic dignity and self respect to write code it shouldn’t be ashamed of. But then I instruct it to do something and it does it with speed I’m never able to achieve, even if the code is ugly. But it works.
Works until you discover subtle bugs hiding behind ugliness.
Which is true for human-written code as well.
In both cases, it's your processes (automated testing, review, manual QA) that is the bulwark against bugs and issues.
With AI, you can set up great processes like having it check every PR against the source code of your dependencies or having it generate tests for what's an intermediate step or ephemeral solution that you would never write tests for if you had to do it yourself.
There's this idea on HN that if you delegate too much to AI, you get worse code. Presumably not appreciating all the code-improving processes you can delegate to AI, particularly processes you were never doing for hand-written code.
Yes, there are so many. As in hand-written code. I don’t take LLM written code for granted and I rewrite is sometimes. I know it’s not perfect. But it’s useful.
Compile code is not perfect also. But who does hand-written assembler anymore? Yes, LLM is another layer, it would be ugly and slower but it’s much faster to use.
The thing is that with the code you've written you wrote it in a way that you understand and you have mental model of how it works therefore it is much easier to reason about potential edge cases that have not been covered.
That philosophy wouldnt help justify the narrative for their massive valuation.
I just upgraded and you can still show/hide the entire editor like before
Agent is where tokens are consumed, and where they can charge you more.
> I still want to _code_ not just vibe my way through tickets.
You and I want this. My EMs and HoEs and execs do not. I weep for the future of our industry.
I guess they are assuming LLMs will just get better and better until youn don't look at code at all.
Ignoring the fact that software will just keep getting more and more complex and interconnected... There will always be a new frontier or code and UX
They're targeting the 90% of code that doesn't really need to be looked at. Software is already so complex and interconnected that it is fully beyond human capabilities, each person only knows a tiny part of the stack. If you create your own full system from scratch, it's not going to be very generally useful.
> I feel like this design direction is leaning more towards a chat interface as a first class citizen and the code itself as a secondary concern.
That's because that's exactly where we're headed, and it's fine.
NASA vibes all its note taking apps
Imagine you are the top engineer of your company. Everybody wants your attention, many meetings, design sessions, and of-course code reviews.
With Claude Code, I use Gitlab for reviewing code. And then I let Claude pull the comments.
It looks like the new UI has a big focus on multiple agents. While it feels wrong, the more you split up your work into smaller merge requests, the easier it is to review the work.
Chat first is the way to go since you want the agent busy making its code better. Let it first make plans, come up with different ideas, then after coding let it make sure it fully tests that it works. I can keep an agent occupied for over a hour with e2e tests, and it’s only a couple hundred lines of code in the end.
embrace tradition, return to vscode
The philosophy still works, you just have to change your view. Instead of trying to work side by side with the agent on every turn (inside of your IDE), instead the agent performs a unit of work and then you review it. You can use your IDE to view the diff, or another diffing tool.
If you've dug in sufficiently on plan mode, then what the agent is executing is not a surprise and shouldn't need input. If it does, the plan was insufficient and/or the context around the request (agents.md, lessons.md, or whatever tools and documents you use ) weren't sufficient.
EDIT: Maybe it doesn't work in cursor, but I continue to use vscode to review diffs and dig in on changes.
Then code.
At least these are IDEs with the save button finally gone
We needed that jump, there were still floppy disk icons
Why I harp on owning your stack instead of outsourcing your Ai experience and interface to Big Ai. There are many frameworks that make this much easier today. I chose ADK which is more of a lift, but also works for non-coding use cases.
that is what is catching the most users right? they want to vibe code their way into oblivion
I'm not a developer — I build custom camper vans for a living. I started with Cursor and also ran Claude inside it via the extension. But I eventually moved away from it entirely. The reason is kind of the opposite of what most developers want: I can't read code at all, so an IDE with a file tree, editor panels and diffs is just noise to me. Now I do everything through the Claude Desktop app on Linux — it's an Electron app that started on Mac and made its way to Linux. It has a Chat tab, a Cowork tab, and a Code tab, so I never need to touch a terminal unless I want to. I just describe what I want and it works directly on the files without me ever seeing them. I've shipped a real Linux app with a GNOME extension, it's on GitHub with hopefully some active users soon. These tools have completely changed who gets to build software. Is there a reason why I should consider going back to using Cursor? Thank you all for your insights.
I am a developer by profession and this is the opposite of what I would want. The code is your ground truth. If all else fails, the code should reasonably be able to tell you why, and by being able to read it, it makes me independent from some closed model.
"I have never woodworked a day in my life, with Claude Carpenter I don't have to touch the work at all and can just vaguely ask for things and pray that it does something useful."
If you're inexperienced you have no bookcase at all, going from that to a rickety bookcase is an enormous improvement.
(Perhaps this is why some devs dislike it, perhaps they place the quality of their work very very high)
I mean claude carpenter sounds pretty sick
Until it builds a stairway which leads to an attic in such a way that the access is under the shallowest part of the roof and unusable.
I've tried using the 3D generation stuff a bit, but it never worked out.
Still amazed that folks such as:
https://www.reddit.com/r/openscad/comments/1adcw41/i_am_comp...
manage to get anything usable in 3D at all, but making an STL is a big difference from making a useful architectural structure.
The comment itself looks/feels very AI influenced (if not entirely written by AI). Actually, since an hour ago (when this account first started posting), all comments from this account have that look/feel.
Flagged for AI comment
This sh*t is getting out of hand right now. I deleted my Twitter recently because every tweet would have AI replies. And HN is dying the same fate.
So it has converged to the same UI/UX as the Claude/Codex desktop apps. If that's the case, why use Cursor over those more canonical apps?
1. Cursor is multi-model, meaning you can use at least a dozen different models.
2. Cursor's UI allows you to edit files, and even have the good old auto-complete when editing code.
3. Cursor's VSCode-based IDE is still around! I still love using it daily.
4. Cursor also has a CLI.
5. Perhaps more importantly, Cursor has a Cloud platform product with automations, extremely long-lived agents and lots of other features to dispatch agents to work on different things at the same time.
Disclaimer: I'm a product engineer at Cursor!
I hope this comes off as constructive criticism, but I'm confused about what cursor is now.
Cursor is an IDE and an agentic interface and a cli tool and a platform that all work locally and and in the cloud and in the browser and supports dozens of different models.
I don't know how to use the thing anymore, or what the thing actually is.
I'm having the same issue, as a former Cursor user and current Claude Code addict. CC is a very clear mental model. So is "agent in your IDE," like Cursor used to be and Xcode is now. The advantage of my current setup is that it's the terminal and Xcode, just as it has been for over 20 years.
I applaud Cursor for experimenting with design, and seeing if there are better ways of collaborating with agents using a different type of workspace. But at the moment, it's hard to even justify the time spent kicking the tires on something new, closed source and paid.
it sounds like you described it pretty well!
Let me give this a shot:
Cursor was the tool you use to pair program with AI. Where the AI types the code, and you direct it as you go along. This is a workflow where you work in code and you end up with something fundamentally correct to your standards.
Claude Code is the tool you use if you want to move one abstraction layer up - use harness, specs, verifications etc. to nail down the thing such that the only task left is type in the code - a thing AI does well. This is a workflow where the correctness depends on a lot of factors, but the idea is to abstract one level up from code. Fundamentally, it would be successful if you don't need to look at code at all.
I think there is not enough data to conclusively say which of these two concepts is better, even taking into account some trajectory of model development.
I do feel that any reason I have for installing Cursor is that I want to do workflow 1, rather than workflow 2. Cause I have a pretty comprehensive setup of claude code (or opencode, or whatevs) and I think it does everything you list here.
So, as a product engineer, you probably wanna mention why it matters that Cursor UI allows you to edit files with auto-complete.
I would switch to Cursor 3 in a heartbeat if it supported Claude Agent SDK (w/ Claude Max subscription usage) and/or Codex the way that similar tools like Conductor do
And I would happily pay a seat based subscription fee or usage fees for cloud agents etc on top of this
Unfortunately very locked into these heavily subsidized subscription plans right now but I think from a product design and vision standpoint you guys are doing the best work in this space right now
Is there going to be any more development on the frontier of cursor tab completion and features like that (more focused on helping engineer's with llm's for complex tasks) since I feel this is the main reason I dont use claude code or codex. I want to be writing the code, since I want performant, small, codebases that I understand (I am writing eBPF stuff, so agentic coding doesnt work that well)
Computer use in the cloud for me is THE killer feature.
Can you elaborate on how you are using it?
vscode + claude code extension has everything you listed that actually matters
You can use almost any model with Claude Code.
that doesnt make sense. how?
Here's how to use MiniMax v2.7 for example: https://platform.minimax.io/docs/token-plan/claude-code
You just add this to your ~/.claude/settings.json:
ah 'almost' . i want to use codex.
For $20 a month, I can plan and implements a couple features in 4 hours with Claude. Then I have to wait.
For $20 a month, I can plan and implement thousands of features using Composer 2 or Auto with Cursor. The usage limits are insanely higher. Yes, the depth of understanding is not Opus 4.6, but most work doesn't need that. And the work that does need it I pass to Claude.
I can code 8 hours a day using LLMs as my primary driver spending just $40 a month.
Yep, Composer 2 has been quite good for me too. I only turn to Opus for major brainteasers.
the codex limits are actually pretty high too. You might want to check it out.
Agree with that, they seem really good limits for daily use on something like Chat GPT Pro $20 account. I'm in the curious situation of using the Codex CLI within Cursor IDE and not really getting value out of my $60 Cursor sub. Plus at every update it seems Cursor seems to break more of their UI in the 'not a cloud agent chat UI' vs the more traditional VSCode sort of layout of code first. I should probably cancel.
You can do this with copilot, for the $40/mo range, AND you get to use opus 4.6 for all of it. Copilot is absurdly cheap if you can make it fit your work profile.
I mean, in that case, cannot you do the same by just using sonnet instead of opus?
My man, have seen the Sonnet 4.6 tho
Computer use in the cloud is the main reason I use them. It's a game changer. It has its own dev env with a browser / shell and can test what it wrote (a bit of a hassle to set it up, but when it's working, wow)
Brand recognition. Since "model-is-the-service", various previously-interesting companies become thin API resellers and the moat is between "selling a dollar for fifty cents" and Brand awareness.
I am not saying this in bad faith. Model companies cannot penetrate every niche with the same brand recognition as some other companies you would consider as "API resellers" do.
I kinda quit using it. The tab feature is useful when making minor or mundane changes, but I quite prefer the codex GUI if I am going to be relatively hands off with agents.
Model independence
That gap was closed by opencode months ago.
different products - CLI vs apps
Not really, no. Coding CLIs are hugely popular with the "App user" crowd, see Claude Code.
I think that's more fashion than anything.
Every company I've worked at has still had a few engineers who insist on working exclusively in the CLI with vim/emacs prior to AI. Every other engineer used some flavor of a desktop app ranging from more minimal editors to incredibly complex IDEs. I expect we land back on UIs long term.
I won’t, but it does have a couple features Codex lags, including remote SSH (huge, because the easiest way to sandbox your agent is to put it into a VM), and the ability to kicking things of on your mobile and finishing up on your desktop (again, really nice if you get a good idea out on a walk, or while talking to a colleague.
These are features I am sure Codex will soon have, of course.
Then there is the advantage of multiple models: run a top level agent with an expensive model, that then kicks of other models that are less expensive - you can do this in Claude Code already (I believe), but obviously here you are limited to something like Haiku.
I love Cursor. As a Product Manager who's not really had coding experience, it's been very useful. I'm able to have a browser on the side and make changes easily, and click through exactly what I want to change rather than having the LLM guess which component I'm talking about. Having multiple models has also been great, as well as the MCP integration. Most times I don't need all the MCPs, but I like being able to turn them on or off based on what I'm doing, like JIRA or Grafana.
One of my favorite startups and I genuinely like to keep subscribing to them.
Really great improvements and can really feel the perf being a lot better.
The surprisingly lacking thing for me is the worktree support is really behind other tools. Conductor/Composer/Superset etc realized making the sidebar PRs/worktree focused rather than chat focused can feel great. But Cursors worktree support seems underbaked?
Just switched to Claude code with a max20 sub for ~200$/mo. Getting the same load done as previously with cursor api calls going over 7000$/mo. Now using the vscode/cursor plugin and have CC within cursor tabs natively - good combo, can recommend!
What would all these companies do without Microsoft shipping VS Code as open source, probably still stuck with vi and Emacs.
Still curious which ones will survive when the AI gold diggers finally settle.
VS Code wouldn’t have won the mid-2010s editor wars if it was closed source (note that VS Code has not helped MS ramp people up to VS itself). The winner of that war was always going to be an open source editor, it was just Microsoft whose concept won out. Closed source editors like Coda failed to gain traction and even Sublime Text fell eventually.
If MS ever decided to discontinue VS Code or relicense it, there would be blood in the water. I guarantee you there would be multiple compelling competitors in under a year and probably a new open source winner with consolidation in 5.
So to answer your question: they would be forking Atom (which I think would’ve won otherwise).
> So to answer your question: they would be forking Atom (which I think would’ve won otherwise).
Atom was far slower than VS Code, despite both of them being built on Electron. I wouldn't have used Atom, but I use VS Code.
It is entirely possible that some other closed-source editor with a superior package/extension system would have won, or the "war" would have been postponed until Rust was ready enough for Zed to come along.
Sublime Text fell because VS Code was just better, not because it was closed source. I switched from Sublime Text to VS Code, and didn't care one bit how open or close either was.
Not saying there aren't people who care, there are, but they are a small minority.
More like many devs are cheap and paying for Sublime is too much to ask for.
VS Code only got better because it was open source though, the community contributed so much. Sublime Text was vastly superior in the beginning in pretty much every way.
Zed's not a VSCode clone, and it's fantastic and OSS. They don't really have a business model that I see working though, IMO. I pay them purely because I love the editor, but the editor is free. The AI integration is what you pay for, but I just run claude code in a terminal.
Sounds like cursor is not using vscode anymore in this release?
every AI lab have cli for agent coding. you don't need VS Code. if you want coding agent to write code for you just use cli then use any IDE, text editor or whatever you prefer to review, edit or write code.
There is even a cli version of cursor.
https://cursor.com/cli
There's also Eclipse.
Oh my god, this comment gave me flashbacks to when I was writing android apps in Eclipse + ADT
And Eclipse Foundation maintains VSCode-compatible editor designed to be a framework for other IDEs: https://theia-ide.org/
IMO sounds like natural foundation for Cursor
Funny thing about Theia is that it is based on the only thing MS made themselves - Monaco editor.
shudders does anyone pine for eclipes?
I haven't used it in a decade, Im sure it has has evolved
There was a time that Eclipse was my preferred editor. It was free and it gave cool sexy features that all the cool kids who could afford Visual Studio had, and it worked on Linux!
Nowadays I'm basically a Neovim purist, but I have positive memories of it. I'm kind of afraid to revisit it at this point, though, since everyone hates on it and I suspect I wouldn't like it as much.
Certainly do.
My job replaced eclipse with VSCode for Java+Spring development.
Can’t say I miss eclipse, but a lot of the VSCode extensions seems to utilize old legacy eclipse stuff and has the bugs to match.
Did you consider IntelliJ, even just the community edition?
If not you really should. IntelliJ with Java is one of the best dev experiences I've ever had. I'm a VSCode fan for most other things but for Java I wouldn't even remotely consider using it over IntelliJ if I had the option :-)
Your are still running Eclipse, Red-Hat and Microsoft run it headless.
It is not old.
Likewise Oracle VSCode version runs Netbeans headless.
It's still horrendous.
I find a lot of these IDEs are simply not as useful as a CLI. When I'm running a full agentic workflow, I don't really need to see the contents of the files at all time, I'd actually say I often don't need to at all, because I can't really understand 10k lines of code per hour.
What role do you play in creating software? If you don't need to see any code, should your employer consider cutting your position? I'm very much pro-humans-in-the-workforce, but I can't understand how someone could be ok with doing so little at their job.
There is a large and growing segment of executives in the software world that is pushing this model hard, like betting their career on it. To them the “dark factory” is an inevitability. As a consequence, not only are developers choosing this path, but the companies they work for are in varying degrees selecting this path for them.
Most, if not all of them, are shooting themselves in the foot. I've been saying this for a long time. The only thing LLMs actually are useful for is automating labor and reducing the amount a worker can demand for their work. Don't fall for this trap.
The agents aren't going to orchestrate themselves.
You also don't need to write or read the code to build great software.
This is how many high output teams are working now:
- Human writes PRD (usually with help of agent)
- Agent breaks down PRD into engineering specs with human review and input on and on technical implementation (architecture decisions, etc)
- Team of agents implement PRDs
- Team of agents reviews PRDs and checks for fidelity against both PRD and spec, fixing automatically or asking human for input if PRD or spec is unclear
- Team of agents tests final work product against spec and presents to human for final verification
Humans writing code manually is over.
Humans reviewing code manually and in-detail is mostly over.
Humans directing high-level architecture is still here for now but will likely be reduced in the near future.
Then do you think this new data entry position is going to be smas well paying as your current one?
Better paying, way higher leverage.
On the face of it, "10k lines of code per hour" sounds like a ridiculous metric to the point of parody.
Saying how many lines of code you can write this way is also a bit like bragging that you are building world's heaviest airplane.
If you can’t understand your code, who can?
It’s not their code, and it’s not for them to understand. The endgame here is that code as we know it today is the “ASM” of tomorrow. The programming language of tomorrow is natural human-spoken language used carefully and methodically to articulate what the agent should build. At least this is the world we appear to be heading toward… quickly.
But the endgame is not here and will likely never be, because unlike ASM, LLMs are not deterministic. So what happens when you need to find the bug in the 100,000k LoC you generated in a few weeks that you've never read, and the agent can't help you ? And it happens a lot. I am not doing this myself so I can't comment, but I've heard many vibe coders commenting that a lot of the commits they do is about fixing the slop they outputted a week prior.
Personally, I keep trying OpenCode + Opus 4.6 and I don't find it that good. I mean it does an OK job, but the code is definitely less quality and at the moment I care too much about my codebase to let it grow into slop.
This is a really underwhelming UI for something that is agent-first. It looks like they're mimicking Notion.
The next generation of interfaces are not going to look like an evolution into minimalist text editor v250. This is like people iterating on terminals before building native or web applications.
> This is like people iterating on terminals before building native or web applications.
TUIs blow most modern web apps out of the water in terms of UX
Reading comments, I’m curios why would someone spend thousands for LLM coding? What are you building to justify these skyrocketing token consumption?
I’ve been using AI coding since GitHub copilot was in beta, used all IDEs in the market, and had very few occasions when I passed the $20 subscription limit. And when I did, that was when I decided to move from cursor to CC and Codex, and still, using them everyday and didn’t have to go above my limits.
I've spent US$16 700 last month. I made an autoscaling K8s cluster for distributed compilation/caching on a large C++ project. I also heavily modified the build system to use a forked version of `siso` compatible with our environment.
That meant we can go from 17 minutes on 32 cores to 5 minutes on a few hundred. And because it's distributed compilation we don't have to provision each developer with an overpowered build system they won't be using most of the time.
It could also eliminate our CI backlog because autoscaling. Over a few hundred engineers building this codebase this probably a few thousand hours of waiting a week.
This took me about 2 weeks as someone who graduated 9 months ago. Most of the tokens were spent in several hour long debugging sessions relating to distributed systems networking and tracing through gRPC logs because the system wasn't working until it did.
I think I'd need several years of experience and 6 months as a full time engineer to have accomplished the same thing pre-AI.
Since I work at a semiconductor company near Toronto there's nobody around with the distributed systems experience to mentor me. I did it mostly on my own as a side project because I read a blog post. I literally wouldn't have been able to complete this without AI.
I'm sure the actual solution is terrible compared to what a senior developer with experience would've created. But my company feels like it's getting ROI on the token spend so far even though it's double my salary.
I've heard rhetoric like "we have to use LLMs to stay competitive now" which attempts to justify the cost
Reminds me of these "if you don't pay 200 dollars per month for AI you are NGMI" comments...
I think if you’re a professional and you’re actually coding for >4 hours per day it makes sense. Also if you’re one of those weirdos that likes to command an army of agents.
Well I’m a software engineer and code more than 4 hours per day.
But I do check the generated code, make sure it doesn’t go banana. I wouldn’t do multiple features at the same time as I have no idea how people are checking the output after that.
I like AI coding and it accelerated my work, but I wouldn’t trust their output blindly
I don't think this is the direction where cursor users want to go, they basically free up the market for VSCode and Zed, and won't be able to compete against lab owning their model.
I'm confused how and if Cursor is still relevant since the Claude Code VSCode extension came out.
The biggest downside for me with Cursor was losing access to gated Microsoft extensions like Python and C#. Even when vibing there are times you will still need a debugger or intellisense.
I note in the comments lots of people saying they are moving back and this latest move looks like the final nail in the coffin for Cursor.
The instructions for say, https://cursor.com/docs/configuration/worktrees are for the 3.0 version now, and the version 2 docs lack images in Wayback Machine. Is there a way to see the old docs if you haven't upgraded?
If only Zed had more extensions I would use it consistently over Cursor to be honest but for now Cursor remains my daily driver.
I like the option for different models that I just don't get with Claude Code. I want an IDE to monitor files and understand the code, not just see snippets (I know that there is still the Editor view in Cursor but with the push towards the Agent view I feel it's headed into a Conductor direction and personally I'm not ready for that).
Just in case all of them are forks from VS Code... I'm pretty much sure you can port the extensions (eg, I used to use VS Code, then I moved to Cursor, then to Windsurf and now I went away and switched to Antigravity but the first 3 were able to install the same extensions)
Zed is not a fork of VS Code. It is one of the few genuine new editors in the last few years. Written in Rust and much smoother than VS Code and its forks.
Daily cursor user who's been previewing this a bit while it was in alpha.
I think it's a really solid release, and while cursor seems to have fallen out of the "cool kids club" in the past three months it remains the most practical tool for me doing AI-first work in a large production code base. The new UI works better in a world where agents are doing most of the work and I can hop back into the IDE interface to make changes.
We've set up a linear integration where I can delegate simpler tasks to cloud agents, and the ability to pick that work up in cursor if I need to go back in forth is a real productivity boost. The tighter integration with cloud agents is something I've been hoping for recently.
I appreciate not being tied at the hip to one model provider, and have never loved doing most of my work from the command line. I was on vs code + meta's internal fork of it for years prior to the current AI wave, so that was a pretty natural transition. I'm pretty optimistic on cursor's ability to win in the enterprise space, and think we're going to see open source models + dev tools win with indie devs over things like claude code as costs start getting passed down more and the gap between frontier models and open source gets tighter.
I don't agree with this direction. There is entirely too much cognitive load in the interface. The challenge now is how to distill the massive output and information of agent work - this is just surfacing it all to you
The only reason I use Cursor is because I want an ide with agents sometimes. I do not want a gui for just agents. I already have Claude for that if I wanted it. If they're planning to get rid of the ide and make Cursor purely vibe coding, they've lost me as a customer.
Quite honestly, I've turned off almost all of the LLM features in Cursor. No more tab completion. No more agents for little changes. This week, the only code I wrote with agents was low-stakes front end code for our admin panel. Everything else was organic, free range, human-written code. And it's the first time in months I've felt this good about my job. Agents suck the soul out of programming for me by giving a few cheap dopamine hits.
Truth be told, if Cursor removes the vs code bits, I'll probably see what Nova is like, or what Sublime has been up to. Or maybe kick the tires on Zed.
It looks like they revamped the agents window. They will not remove vscode bits
Maybe I'm just behind on the features, I didn't even know there was an agents window. There's an agents sidebar.
I can't tell you how much it pisses me off when on I click on an article on an english-speaking forum and see a german translation, despite having my browser configured to tell websites that I speak both german and english[1].
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...
Gotta give it to the Cursor team, they must have REALLY good numbers. They raised at a 9.9b valuation less than a year ago and now apparently targeting 50b.
Makes no sense to me, the main driver of codex, Claude code, etc.. seems to be fixed cost plans that offer reduced token cost. Cursor doesn’t have a good model so they can’t offer that (at least not to the same extent).
Composer 2 is great tbh. It makes my over runs of the ultra plan much less painful.
I’m a Cursor user but I am not an agent maximalist. I just like having it work on code in an IDE with good inline diffs and a nice chat UI.
This change is possibly too big and unless all my existing usage patterns are maintained or improved, I’ll likely give CC a try now. Not optimistic.
If you're in the market, OpenCode is quite good and has become my daily driver. You may also consider pi[0], but that's (from what I've heard) more agenty.
[0] https://shittycodingagent.ai/
I only used Cursor in short bursts so 20 USD per month was hard to justify. I recently switched to VSCodium + Cline + OpenRouter and I can use any model I want (currently Step 3.5 Flash for "Temu Sonnet"). It scratches the itch very well for me for literal pennies on the dollar.
I should also add: Cline doesn't require any account at all. I just installed the extension and added my OpenRouter API key and that was it.
It's looks like antigravity's agent manager or codex app. Guess we have new unified interface now , IDEs have out grown vscode UX
Devswarm.ai is something worth checking out too. Similar but it has a built in IDE and more tools for multi-agent development. Can manage multiple repos, worktrees and ai agents in one window. They have a free and paid version.
I recently cancelled my cursor subscription (and chatgpt), and went all in on pi.dev.
The thing I've noticed is cursor was better at producing better results with a really shitty prompt.
That said, well written prompts on pi.dev seem to be out performing anything I ever tried on Cursor. That may just be me, but it's what I've noticed in my work.
This week I had 4 different agents, each with sub agents, all working on different tasks. Mostly greenfield work. My feedback was mostly nitpicky. I was pretty damn impressed
I've mostly switched to claude code ( using the intellij plugin ) since I like the functionality of claude code more. But I will say the one thing i miss is the tab autocomplete cursor has. It looks like they're mostly going in the direction of agentic development though with this which unfortunately doesn't interest me as much but maybe I'm missing out? I've seen a few people tout the power of using multiple agentic models on different git worktrees.
The identity confusion MeetingsBrowser describes is real, but I think there's a coherent product thesis underneath it: Cursor wants to be the surface where you interact with agents, not just the tool where you write code. The problem is that those two things require opposite UX philosophies. Agent-first needs ambient, background autonomy. Code-first needs precise, synchronous control. Trying to do both in one product means you're always making tradeoffs that frustrate one half of your users. Claude Code sidesteps this by not trying to be an IDE at all — it's just an orchestration layer you invoke from wherever you already work.
I used Cursor with Opus but was expensive. I've moved to Zed with Claude max plan and have enjoyed the fast editor and get way more out of my Max plan. Zed offers enough inline suggestions for free.
Funny how in this space, once a company feels dead, you don’t even check out their release if the video looks decent, it would have to be totally revolutionary.
I predict Cursor will be acquired by Anthropic to marry the UI with Claude code.
Cursor works better for me than Claude Code. In my opinion, Claude intelligence is too narrow.
Good luck explaining all the details to Claude, it tends to ignore them anyway. Like a middle-level SWE, it's too stubborn to appreciate them, and prefers to blast energy (tokens) on shuffling the lines instead of seeing a bigger picture.
Cursor, in contrast, is a highly educated coder that gets you immediately.
I've got an impression that Claude Code is more oriented on unattended development of CRUD applications, while Cursor is more refined and closer to a senior-level SWE/PhD for productive work in pair.
We liked using Cursor a lot, great developer experience assisted with AI. I am not sure if this is the right direction.
Worth noting, a few weeks ago we got hit with $2500 of unauthorized usage during the weekend. We stopped using it because of security concerns, no 2FA, and some risky defaults: “Only Admins Can Edit Usage Settings” is off by default.
Hard to trust in a team setting without stronger safeguards.
The reason I used cursor, other than it being paid by my employer, is that it had a pretty good integration between IDE and the agent workflow.
If I want to mostly direct 1 or more agents I go straight to claude code (codex at home.)
But I still want to have a IDE at the end of the day, I do look and review the code. I still need to direct it to fix some things it doesn't do properly and I dont feel like giving up my understanding of the system I work with (despite what the vibe people say) I don't think it will lead to good outcomes or any benefit in the name of speed.
So for me this direction goes against what I find useful in cursor, and entirely seems to look out for the the 10+ agents crowd. Which makes sense, these are the guys spending +200 $ subscriptions and so on. I'll go back to Zed + CC or Codex.
By the way their new interface looks just like the Codex App.
I like cursor and its workflow as a tool, but I do wonder whether moving to cloud (I mean for lots of the cool features) will work. Yes we all GET Cursor has to make money. No one is fooled what this is about. It's also fine, the video and screenshot thing is great.
However, is this really a moat?
Not clear to me how cursor can remain relevant in the era of agent coding. The main things I care about now are navigation and quick editing. Vanilla VS Code or vim with some extensions does the job for me now.
Looking at the video cursor 3 UI looks very similar to the one I experience using OpenCode :D
Why does nearly all product marketing these days have to be delivered via "personality led" marketing?
Looks like they're now playing catchup.
What's the pitch for using Cursor now a days?
Good autocomplete for those of us who still write code.
Me too, I have the bad feeling autocomplete will be sunsetted sooner or later, it clearly isn't the path they're getting into. Also it started to get worse lately, it tries too hard to predict, it wasn't like that some time ago, hopefully you know what I'm saying
I was loving Cursor for the agents and autocomplete which was amazing. When they started talking about the autocomplete being no longer a focus and looking towards these token blackholes I switched back to VSCode. At $10 a month it's even cheaper.
The features here don’t seem game changing. The most compelling parts are mostly already available in Claude or Codex or their related apps and services.
The biggest concern is that if you want to use SOTA models I don’t see how they can match what you get with the subscription plans of Anthropic and Open AI, whether your spending $20 or $200 a month.
Even if they could match what you get in terms of token quantity, they are giving their tools away for free for the foreseeable future and Cursor is not.
They're juggling on two ends. An IDE and bringing their own models. Kinda makes them "full stack".
Nerve wreaking race.
I think I'll switch over to cursor on trial basis.
Cursor is so good for what I do is that I've cancelled my Cursor subscription and went back to VSCode (w/o Copilot) for the diff review and code navigation.
I'm not following at all?
I assume they meant that "Claude Code is so good..." and that they cancelled Currsor and just use CC + VSCode.
I left cursor and went back to VS Code b/c the editing experience is basically the same and cursor was adding more and more agentic features which don't appeal to me. I'm a happy Claude Code user and having my code separate from the planning/brainstorming part of the task makes implementing its own step with me driving/writing the code.
Cursor died for me when they star putting limits and time waits everywhere even on more expensive plans.
I totally preferred the other way, but at some point , there is boiler plate or organizations you just want done and it does not make sense to put you waiting minutes a time to confirme few refactors. That literally killed the vibe for cursor to me
The biggest killer feature Cursor has that so far no one else seems to have is cloud based computer use. It’s such a game changer. You get a walkthrough video instead of just diffs. But as soon as anthropic release it (their computer use is local only, no thanks) I might consider switching though. Mostly due to the subsidized $200 plan.
I don't understand what problems this release is solving.
I'm happy w my VS Code harness which has also improved A LOT just with the last update alone.
CLIs are 100000× better than this non-sense.
No they are not. Tired of this 40 year old terminal setback instead of having real and beautiful GUIs. Its fine for some kind of people but don't think what works for you is acceptable for the other 50% of us.
I agree with you but what they're launching here is not a beautiful GUI. It's minimalist (in a bad way) and not really innovative.
Oh yeah I am not talking about cursor, maybe what it felt like when it was 1.0. There will be a new breed of GUIs for people who don't touch terminals. Opencode web and devin code review have a little glimmer of that but it will probably look very different.
I upgraded from cursor 2 to cursor 3 and the quality of generated code and the ability to follow instructions has dropped massively :(
The main reason we pay for cursor is for bugbot, that alone pays for itself 10x over.
Personally I never use the actual IDE, and much prefer Claude code with helix in the terminal.
So your company is fine giving access to their entire GitHub to a third party, and being locked into GitHub too? If their SaaS could work with local only repo setups it would be a better UX...
What is the special sauce of cursor. As a harness I assume it's mostly context management right? And maybe some defensive coding to mitigate probabilistic llms? Is there any big difference between cursor and Claude code?
No per-agent auto-worktree? This is the killer feature of Conductor, having to type `/worktree` into every new chat isn't really a resolution. Not even sure what selecting 'Worktree' for a new chat does
i would expect it before the end of the month, why not?
"having to type `/worktree` into every new chat isn't really a resolution"
I don't know what you're talking about. My experience with Cursor (before this new v3) is that new Cursor agent tabs / cloud agents already intelligently manage worktrees to prevent conflicts.
Wow, maybe something is wrong with my setup. In Cursor 3, I am clicking "New Agent" at the top left. My root repository is correctly listed on top of the composer, and I clicked the icon to the right of it and selected 'Worktree'. Then, I instruct the model to run `pwd` and tell me it's git status. It's always just on `main` in my root repository. I dug through the settings and couldn't find anything, and after finding this comment[0] on their forums gave up. Would you mind sharing a bit more about your setup/how it works?
[0] https://forum.cursor.com/t/working-with-worktrees-in-cursor/...
cursor should be advertising multi-model adversarial reviews, I do this all the time and let me tell you things that slip through the cracks when opus or gpt write code that gemini catches are downright scary, on the backend anyway.
I don't understand how this product can be productively useful. It looks like any other AI chat bot, but I remember hearing people speak very positive things about it. What am I missing?
You're missing nothing with this new ui. For me very good autocomplete + stuff than can be automated with an agent on the side while coding on the other was the peak. I want the control, control to activate/disable autocomplete and agents, I don't want to follow an imposed workflow
I hope we can use it like non-agent developers where code is first class citizen.
This seems like a mix of Claude Code and Superset (https://superset.sh/). Interested to try it out and see how well it performs all the same.
imo there’s a clear greenfield to have doubled down on where cursor was before in proactively keeping devs appraised of the code that they’re generating, and bridging growing gaps between abstracted chat sessions and files/directory structures I might understand less and less
This on the other hand feels like a clear reaction to cc/codex, in a way that even kind of builds an offboarding ramp?
wow, a mangled vscode fork that's now also codex? the future is so bright
Maybe I'm old, but I only recently started using Gemini to assist me in coding. Now it seems everyone is heading to giving agents to do the full-blown coding. I guess if the result code is good, it doesn't matter who's coding (me or AI).
But are they affordable already for developers who don't earn a Silicon Valley salary? Developers in 3rd world countries?
I'm not convinced people who are doing real work on production applications with any sizable user base is writing code through only agents. There's no way to get acceptable code from these models without really knowing your code base well and basically doing all the systems thinking for the model.
Your workflow is probably closer to what most SWEs are actually doing.
You really need to keep them on a tight leash, stop and correct them when they start screwing up, and then the remaining 90% of the work starts after they say their done, where you need to review/refactor/replace a lot of what they produced.
The only way you're going to let an agent go off on its own to one-shot a patch is if your quality bar is merely "the code works."
This, at least for me, has changed in the past six months. Which is the same thing people were saying in the months prior to that, so I will accept some eye rolls. But at least for our pretty large monorepo opus + a lot of engineering work on context got us to a point where a large portion of our engineers are doing most of their work with agents first and a lot of back and forth + smaller hand edits.
Agreed. The size of the repo isn't a limiting factor anymore. It's more about the type of change.
Agents today can generate solid code even for relatively complex requirements. However, they don't always make the right trade-offs.
Just because something works doesn't mean it scales. It doesn't mean it can handle unexpected user input. It doesn't mean it's easily extensible.
Today engineers really just need to define those high-level technical requirements.
> Today engineers really just need to define those high-level technical requirements.
At least within our company, this is quickly becoming what it means to be a software engineer.
Not true. As long as you don't blindly accept their garbage and keep things behind sensible interfaces so you can reimplement if necessary, and have good tests you're fine
So what’s next for Antigravity?
What is Cursor doing? They need to relax a little bit. Recently I saw they released "Glass" which WAS here: https://cursor.com/glass, now just redirects to /download.
Is "Cursor 3" == Glass? I get they feel like their identity means they need to constantly be pushing the envelope in terms of agent UX. But they could stand to have like an "experimental" track and a "This is VS Code but with better AI integration" track.
Glass was a codename while the UI was in early alpha with testers. It redirects to download now because there is no special link anymore. It's just part of Cursor 3 itself.
So funny , I remember their talk about re-imagining their editor for the future of agents. They end up copying codex gui lol.
These AI companies are running out of ideas, and are desperate. I can't imagine investing in companies that are 3 month behind open source alternatives, and their target audience being the most experimental kind there is.
Looks pretty though.
so just like how every chat app has to look like slack, every ide has to look like vscode, now every agent workspace has to look like the codex app? codex app, antigravity, and now this all have the exact same UI design...
Cursor seems like far worse value than Codex with a ChatGPT subscription. Doesn't equivalent usage of the $200 subscription cost over $1000? I don't understand why people use it when you can just get multiple Pro subscriptions.
Is composer 2 any good? Can it be compared to opus ou gpt 5.4?
No it's not very good. But when you run out of Claude tokens it's perfectly fine for small stuff.
Cursor's inline autocomplete is very good though, much better than anything I could reproduce in Zed with various 3rd party "edit" LLMs (although checking google, they announced a new model since I tried it https://zed.dev/blog/zeta2)
I ran parallel prompt with composer 2 and gpt5.3 codex. Composer did slightly better, in terms of variable naming and extra tweaks to loosely related files to keep the codeb consistent.
This is just Codex App, like even the font feels the same
I still think every developer should be building their own IDE
https://github.com/rbren/personal-ai-devbox
Thought I'd give it a try and installed the latest version. Application crashes at startup on Linux (Wayland) with: "The window terminated unexpectedly (reason: 'crashed', code: '139')". Probably yet another instance of developers mostly testing and doing quality assurance on macOS/Windows.
Hey, sorry about that! Some AUR packages share cursor in a way that isn't forward+backwards compatible across releases. We recommend using our official AppImage from https://cursor.com/download Alternatively, please use a different AUR package that doesn't have these issues https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/cursor-nightly-bin
I am using it on fedora from the yum repo and it's crashing for me too.
https://forum.cursor.com/t/sigsegv-in-zygote-type-zygote-on-...Apparently if launched with --verbose it works, but that's the same crash I was seeing without the verbose flag
I prefer to avoid AppImages if I can but I gave it a try anyway and it still fails with exactly the same error. What made you think it's just a packaging issue?
I'm running it ok arch Wayland (sway), installed last month I think. Maybe related to your electron package.
Thanks, it is horrible. This is a massive step backwards. The IDE provides so much extra abilities that an agent simply can’t handle.
I was a long time (relative to AI age) Cursor fan but have since abandoned it for Claude Code. Working on mostly php/laravel/js/vue stack the difference in the quality of models is insane. No other model can really compete with Opus, and using it through Cursor is just insanely expensive.
So while the Cursor AI is great, especially for reviewing generated code, it just can't compete.
but have they fixed the jumping agent chat panel?
I prefer cli based coding agents (Codex or Claude Code). I use wezterm and tmux, split my screen, open neovim on the left, lazygit below neovim, my coding agent on the right.
Wasn’t Composer 2 a “fine tune” of Kimi2.5?
Cursor seem to selectively changed some plans. I use the $20 plan both at work and at home.
Ar work I am still on 500 fast requests plan, so I can use quite some Opus 4.6 requests, but at home my quota is finished after about 14 Opus requests.
For my personal use, I will probably switch to Forge Code or Pi and MiniMax 2.6, GLM 5.1 or Qwen 3.6.
Cursor is getting too expensive.
Damnit, now I probably have to update my vscode plugin to support Cursor 3... I mean have a coffee or go for a swim while waiting on AI to update my vscode plugin to support Cursor 3. :P
Wow another big layer on top of forked vs code, that now looks like github with an agent. I'll totally pass
Stop fucking my shit up please
My exact reaction when they override my cmd+e shortcut and change the default layout every two months :)
Looks like the editor is still there, and the revamped UI is a new window you can open on the side.
The output isn't yours, and never was due to copyright law opinion.
The input isn't yours, as it is stolen and re-sold to other people.
The model isn't yours, as it was built with piracy, theft of service, and EULA violations.
What are people doing exactly... outside data-entry for free. =3
I really dislike this push away from augmentation and towards agents. I get that people want to be lazy and just have the LLM do all of their work, but using the AI as an augmentation means you are the driver and can prevent it from making mistakes, and you still have knowledge of the codebase. I think there is so much more we could be doing in the editor with AI, but instead every company just builds a chatbot. Sigh.
fleets
So they are just turning into another vibe code slop app?
At least before they were tangentially still an actual developer tool, standard vsc windows, the code was the point etc.
Now they offer really nothing interesting for professionals.
All the VS code stuff is literally still there
> Now they offer really nothing interesting for professionals.
That's a curious statement given that what they're doing is just becoming more like Claude Code, which seems extremely popular on this forum.
Wow, really negative comments here! I'm not a cursor user, and I can't say I love the look of this UI, but my team and I are very heavy users of https://www.conductor.build . Managing many agents, each in their own sandbox, felt like indisputably the future after using conductor for a day. We were a cursor company before conductor, but we cancelled all our seats around the time Opus 4.6 dropped because conductor was vastly more productive. So IMO, Cursor is definitely moving in the right direction w/ this -- the days of the IDE are numbered & they're correctly designing for the future.
For me, there's no way to get into a flow state if I'm thinking about terminal windows and Claude Code. Even before conductor dropped on our team, I'd been building CLIs to spin up agent sandboxes on work trees -- but that still required a lot of terminal window management.
My work now is usually: - 1 hard task (hard to think about more than 1 of these at once) -- localized to a sandbox, but with multiple agents in different convo threads - N simpler tasks (usually 4-8). These are usually one-shottable. They're a pleasure to come up with & ship.
I'm thinking about and managing the hard task. When it's cooking for more than 10 seconds, I'm switching to an ez task and pushing them along.
Just like OG coding -- hard to be in a flow state every day. But when it works, you can get an unbelievable amount of work done.
I'll be walking around now, and I'll add voice notes of little tasks or cleanups I want to throw an agent at when I get home. Good products are made of 1000s of small, good decisions -- and now those are free to implement, the slowest part is writing them down as tickets.