Comment by defatigable

Yeah, I have no idea what the consensus definition of the term is, and I suppose I can't say for sure what OP meant. I haven't used Cursor. My understanding was that it exercises IDE functions but does not execute arbitrary shell commands, maybe I'm wrong. I've specifically had good experiences with the tools being able to run arbitrary commands (like the git debugging example I mentioned).

In my experience reading discussions like this, people seem to be saying that they don't believe that Claude Code and similar tools provide much of a productivity boost on relatively open ended domains (i.e. the AI is driving the writing of the code, not just assisting you in writing your own code faster). And that's certainly not my experience.

I agree with you that success with the initial milestone ("agent operates in a self-contained loop and can execute arbitrary commands") was achieved pretty quickly. But in my experience a lot of people don't believe this. :-)