Comment by sixhobbits
1 day ago
Most of these are Anthropic models under the hood, so I think 'whatever fits your workflow best' is the main deciding factor. That's definitely Claude Code for me, and I do think there's some 'secret sauce' in the exact prompting and looping logic they use, but I haven't tried Cursor a lot to be sure.
any secret sauce in prompting etc could be trivially reverse engineered by the companies building the other agents, since they could easily capture all the prompts it sends to the LLM. If there’s any edge, it’s probably more around them fine-tuning the model itself on Claude Code tasks.
Interesting that the other vendors haven't done this "trivial" task, then, and have pretty much ceded the field to Claude Code. _Every_ CLI interface I've used from another vendor has been markedly inferior to Claude Code, and that includes Codex CLI using GPT-5.
Claude code seems like the obvious choice for someone using Vim but even in the context of someone using a graphical IDE like VSCode I keep hearing that Claude is “better” but I just can’t fathom how that can be the case.
Even if the prompting and looping logic is better, the direct integration with the graphical system along with the integrated terminal is a huge benefit, and with graphical IDEs the setup and learning curve is minimal.
You can run Claude Code in the terminal window of VS Code, and it has IDE integration so you can see diffs inline, etc. It's not fully integrated like Cursor but you get a lot of the benefits of the IDE in that way.