Comment by 01100011
17 days ago
I stopped using Cursor when I started getting comfortable with Codex/Claude. Cursor is just annoying with the constant popups and it's just not as good. Now my workflow is to use my normal editor, add a todo describing what I want, and then ask Codex+gpt-5.5 to implement it. It absolutely nails it. Using codex is so much more like working with a partner vs the noise and annoyance of Cursor.
That said, I think we're in a narrow window of time right now where any of this matters. Prompt "engineering" and working around your tools will be over in a year or so.
Fwiw I am a c/c++ systems engineer. I think anyone mentioning anecdotal experience like this should clarify. Maybe frontend JavaScript folks have a totally different take and that's expected.
I use cursor 8+ hours/day at work, and have full (and effectively unlimited) access to Claude Code and Codex - tools which I also use personally. I suspect that your "constant popups" were when you were using the editor - a mode that I'll confess I haven't touched in 3+ months.
Workflow in Cursor is actually awesome - I'm a little outdated in how I use it - I still establish goals/objectives, rather than managing the loop which does so - but if you can think broadly enough - I find it's pretty efficient.
Key things I like about Cursor (and I recognize I'm dating myself a bit here): - Plan Mode is really solid - I shift-tab, have it go create the plan using whatever insanely expensive SOTA model is available - I will usually spend 5-10 minutes on the Plan - review it, maybe even tweak it a little. (though 90% of the time it's fine out of the gate)
The nice thing about Cursor (and honestly Claude Code, Codex) - there isn't really any "prompt engineering" involved. You just say, "Go Build me x - it should have y,z features - and build it in golang for me" - and that's it - the 3-4 page Plan comes back - usually pretty credible - and then you click "build.".
> there isn't really any "prompt engineering" involved
You should make an experiment; take someone who never used any LLMs or agents, and tell them to use it for the first time in front of you, and tell them to build something like a calculator program or whatnot. Bonus points if they're ICs or at least not-managers.
I think there is a lot us engineers take for granted, when it comes to communicating via text, how to state things clearly and what we think/reason when we read things. A lot of people don't have those "skills" innate, and the first time they use LLMs, they basically don't know how to interact with them, until they realize what they're able to do and not. Then they also learn what to say to steer the model into the right way, this is quite literally a "prompt engineering" skill they're now learning.
You don't even have to go outside engineers. I have teammates that get very little out of Claude Code because the way they integrate their own knowledge doesn't allow them to think of what Claude might not know. They'd say a task was impossible with the tooling, and I'd get instant answers, because I understand what is weird internal business logic sitting 6 repos away, and what is knowledge claude has by default. I can commit Claude.md files for them, but I have to include EVERYTHING, because otherwise they'll let Claude make assumptions and waste minutes, if not hours.
It's a big part of what, in my experience, is separating the very good engineer from the iffy one: Do you have a good mental model, and can you put yourself in the shoes of people sitting in a different mental model? It makes you a better dev, and even more so when it comes to AI tools, which have their own kind of alien brain.
4 replies →
This makes a lot of sense and explains why some people are so captivated by modern models, while others see progress as merely incremental.
7 replies →
By that same logic (and I’m agreeing with you as of now), engineers shouldn’t get too comfortable treating “being good at text communication” as a lasting edge. With how quickly agentic coding is evolving, it’s worth considering the possibility that many of the prompting and steering skills we view as valuable today could become far less important in a matter of weeks or months.
Recently I have the SEO guy governing the mostly static, public site with Claude Code. He loves it but you would never imagine the level of mental illness Claude comes up with. If it were an employee I’d literally throw him out the front door, labor laws be damned. And as always, every insane thing it does is some direct echo of its concept and training.
But what's the $60B differentiator here? There are so many similar tools out there. I generally use Opencode, but also Claude code, antigravity and sometimes Kilo code on VS Studio. How can cursor be worth even 10% of 60B?
I don't know what cursors market share is but it feels like 20-25% to me. That is not worth nothing. Then;
1) The data they have flowing through the system that enabled them to build composer (which is much better than stock kimi 2.5) and is presumably allowing the training of a new model on space Xs compute.
2) Cursors new 'github' replacement.
3) Enterprise sales/traction
If you look at all of these together, it's not implausible that they end up mostly 'owning' coding in 5 years time. If they replace GitHub with something more compatible with agentic coding and bring it into their whole ecosystem providing cloud and local agents, PR review and own frontier coding model.
It's specialised vs 'borg' isn't it. One way of thinking is that the world is owned by Anthropic/OpenAI and coding is just one of many things their model and software does. Another view is we have a 'coding with LLMs' company that specialises in this field of endeavour. Hard to say which wins, but I think they have a shot.
Personally my only objection to cursor is that it's more expensive. That's it, otherwise it is great to be able to choose say GPT-5.5 when I want to work on backend and Opus when I want to work on front end. Great to have PR review built in. If they were able to get composer 3 to as good as GPT5.5 / fable at the price of composer 2.5 they'd be winning on price again.
32 replies →
I believe they have some very good training data because of all the data generated by people using the service.
This is the same data they used to finetune Kimi K2.5 to make their newer Composer models, which benchmark substantially better than Kimi K2.5.
I've heard they also want to build their own base models, which will also benefit from their large amount of high-quality training data. Which will solve Grok's model quality problem.
This is all unsourced conjecture of course. But it's what I've heard.
1 reply →
> How can cursor be worth even 10% of 60B?
Maybe because SpaceX paid with monopoly money (all stock deal)?
1 reply →
they are paying for marketshare/customer base. Cursor has a good chunk of it.
xAI overbuilt their data centers - they can't find paying customers for them, that's the reason they made deals with other companies like Google to use their own datacenters.
Cursor has the opposite problem of not having enough capacity. So this works well for them together.
Weather it's worth it - if you beleive that AI will solve every problem then having a piece of the pie early on might be worth it.
Remember how when google bought youtube for 1.65 billions people thought they are crazy? Or when facebook bought instagram.
60B is a crazy number but might be worth it for someone fighting for world dominance :)
4 replies →
I think the argument for Cursor is that it's the dominant tool that enterprises are using for coding, so the theory is Cursor wins that as the "model agnostic", it has a phenomenal Enterprise Sales Team.
From a valuation model - $4B ARR with rapid growth, and the ability to shift traffic to internal models (honestly, massive amount of the time "composer" - their internal model is fine, and obviously going to get better). Say 17x Multiple which isn't unheard for a rapidly growing Startup with solid future structural profit elements (moving to internal model) - that gets you to $68B.
9 replies →
>How can cursor be worth even 10% of 60B?
It can't as long as there is plenty of AI without it.
The real differentiatior is that if $60B today turns out to be all thrown away in a worst-case scenario, it would be easily more affordable and there would be less negative impact than $47B at the time if it was all thrown away on Twitter.
Their revenue is 3B, and 20x is pretty typical.
We’re in the new era where startups boast about and bought based on revenue and not on just a number of users with unclear path to monetizing as it had been for the previous couple decades.
We can also note that we see Thrive Capital (Kushner) again in a win.
Where else are you going to get access to a real-time fresh high quality stream of human intelligence to grow your baby AGI? You can’t buy Codex, Claude, Copilot, so what’s left?
2 replies →
How are you switching between like 5 different editors lol. Bro sloppers will do anything to get their fix. Like the old people at the casino switching slot machines all day based on some occulted understanding that only they think they have.
There is most certainly still prompt engineering involved. How there can be both the responsivity to different cues like "plan this", "write this", "analyze this", "defend this", "poke holes in this", but not responsivity to the various terminology you provide in your explanations of "this", where to get information about specs/standards/requirements, what details I care about, and therefore can't compromise on, vs what details I'm willing to accept whatever the top reddit post from 4 years ago recommends.
I don't see how these systems can have the ability to be effectively expressive about all of the minutia, and not have all of the various different possible expressions lead to vastly different outcomes.
I think all of the cues that you just described are in the plan.
For example - I might (real world example from this morning):
"Create a script that installs hashicorp vault and consul, store the data on consul. Then create ahelper script that will fill the vault server with sample data. Add HTTPS support. Now write a framework that reads and decrypts the encrypted data in consul. Support old (pre 1.3) and new (post 1.3 vault). "
That generates a 6 page plan using Opus 4.8 w/1mm context, including notes on what to prioritize, what format to create the scripts in, etc... (My cursor guidance already has a couple months of hints as to what I want in terms of scaffolding unit tests, canonical linux, performance, security, etc...)
That 6 page plan is the "Prompt" - but it's entirely generated by Cursor/Opus. It's there to tweak if you want to emphasize, or provide some taste - but, honestly - it probably does a better job than I would - so ~90% of the time I just accept the plan as is.
I would say prompt engineering, in the sense of people claiming you need to include in every prompt magic incantations like "You are a senior engineer from a superintelligent alien species" and "take a deep breath and make no mistakes" doesn’t really do that much for everyday work I feel or they are all already included in the system prompt maybe. I reckon it can still edge out a few percentage points in automation.
What actually matters is the ability to communicate well in general, not anything LLM-specific. Being able to state what you want clearly and unambiguously, and having a sense for what additional information you need to dump, even when the other side claims they already have everything they need.
Yes, I tried to use Cursor as an editor. Terrible idea in hindsight.
So your workflow now looks like mine except I prefer a different editor and only use the latest and greatest model so Cursor basically offers nothing over Codex.
I disagree about prompt engineering, but it's one of those things that probably varies because of what language you use, what problems you solve, and the degree to which you care about the output. Unless I'm writing tests, I keep AI on a very short leash because I'm writing critical code used by a very large number of users. I have noticed big differences in output quality depending on how I steer AI. Without steering, it will happily leave in dead code, change the use of variables so they need to be renamed, assume or fail to assume invariants, etc. As I said in another comment, I think we won't need to do that for very much longer, but right now it seems essential.
> You just say, "Go Build me x - it should have y,z features - and build it in golang for me" - and that's it - the 3-4 page Plan comes back - usually pretty credible - and then you click "build.".
What you're describing seems like a workflow for building toys only. There's currently no reality in which someone would actually know what the y,z features are before making them. A plan generated in 5min would likely suggest a suboptimal solution compared to what a good solution would look like (which might take a year or two to figure out, for a human, so still a week or so for SOTA models if at all possible). Building something in golang is cute, but hard to be convinced until more novel applications are being generated from prompts.
The data submitted by Cursor's users tho, that seems to be very valuable.
But that sounds like the same workflow as Codex or Claude, except Cursor is only a harness without its own model? (Or do they have their own model?)
You nailed it - in fact, most of Anthropic's early revenue came from Cursor - much of claude code programming components is essentially a feature copy of Cursor, so it makes sense they are similar.
Cursor does have it's own model - it's a heavily reworked version of KimiK2, called "composer" - that I use a lot of the time when I have fairly straightforward tasks that don't require a lot of exploration or independent thought. Lot cheaper - the Input/CacheWrite/CacheRead/Output costs of Opus 4.8 are $5/$6.25/$0.5/$25 per mm tokens, vs $0.5/-/$0.2/$2.5.
> Key things I like about Cursor (and I recognize I'm dating myself a bit here)
What a world we live in - "dating oneself" is measured in weeks/months! :)
Not trying to be funny but seriously, if these tools can produce a tested 'product' in 45m, shouldn't we be seeing millions of them out there? I mean how far are we from a fully AI built Oracle ERP or even a notepad or helix?
It's a solid question - and to some degree what https://programbench.com/ tries to measure.
Some of the issues (off the top of my head):
- Note - that my "product" was about 3,000 lines of code - so tiny. But https://metr.org/ should give you some insight into the complexity the models are capable of.
- you have to be able to imagine the product. If I have the time, and energy, to imagine what I want - the model will build it. Here is an example of a much better programmer than I and something he wanted built - https://www.boatbomber.com/blog/claude-fable-5
- These are the first drafts. On average - any complex system needs about 10 years and at least 1000 active and enthusiastic about reporting users to really get robust code. Writing if via LLM doesn't (at least so far in my experience) help that much in reducing bugs if you were previously following any semblance of TDD. Lots of bugs in the code - the products you listed above have literally tens of millions of years of user experiences and bug reports that got them to where they are today. No silver bullet yet - just faster, less effort - and it enables non-technical people to create (still buggy) products.
Have you ever heard "I can do that in a weekend" and they usually can. The difficult part is not building the product, it's selling and marketing, the buisness part. It's quite common buisness tactic to outright copy someone else's product or buisness.
Millions of produced verified software engineered products in 45 minutes in the likeness of Oracle ERP or notepad++, helix are small potatoes when you see the unbounded ambitions of SpaceX in full.
The end point may squeeze quality of operations at the subminute time span for ground control environment seriously launching Starship rockets one an hour, for example.
I think I do this with Claude every day. I don’t see why I need to pay for cursor to get this too.
You absolutely don't. I use all three products. My preference is Claude Code for my personal project. The one at work is kind of sandboxed off - but does have the benefit of an MCP for every enterprise service we have (Kibana, Victoria Metrics, Grafana, Jira, etc...) - which is nice.
Over time - I expect Composer will be cheaper than Opus 4.8 - but the nice thing about Cursor - you can flick between models.
And (this is purely a personal thing) - I really like the extensive collection of "Plans" that cursor tracks - there isn't really a similar thing in Claude Code - but I really like the Claude.AI interface for everything else. It's also a much better general knowledge agent - the Cursor Chat interface isn't as nice.
3 replies →
Same.
When I first used Cursor, I hadn't used any of the "Vibe Code" tools out there, so it was pretty neat to have an assistant directly tied to the editor.
Once I learned how to use Codex, I just used a tmux split with NeoVim and have the effect I wanted. I haven't felt compelled to use Cursor at work since.
I also work with C++, and I use Codex (desktop) which writes 99.99% of my code, plus Visual Studio, which is nice for reading and navigating code. For webdev I do VSCode + Codex.
I started with Cursor back in the day, but switched to Claude Code and then Codex when Cursor got too expensive.
If price wasn't an issue, maybe I'd prefer Cursor only because I can easily switch between models. But that's it. I always disliked the "accept/reject" workflow in cursor, but that's probably optional nowadays I guess?
I love the accept reject flow because I still constantly have to stop AI models from writing awful architecture or reimplementing code we already wrote elsewhere
Yeah, I have found the same. A lot of times it does get things right, but if it deviates man it can just drift hard.
For example, sometimes Claude just obsessively reads files and goes on massive tangents. Then when I stop it and ask, "why are you doing that?", it kindly apologizes and admits it shouldn't have gone on a tangent.
The token burn if I don't stop it would be quite high.
Granted, this might be because I'm not giving it optimal prompt/negative-prompt instructions though.
I just check the git diff after claude code writes stuff. Stage things before letting it run wild so I can undo whatevs.
1 reply →
How is it different from Keep / Discard in other tools? I've been slowly converting my git repositories to jj locally because that gives me more granular fallback and mix and match options.
1 reply →
I hate the accept reject flow, because I want a conventional code review workflow where I can write comments on specific lines of code and maybe edit the code myself.
If I reject, then the AI will struggle to modify just the parts I disagree with, if I accept, the AI will tend towards adding code rather than updating the bad code.
At that point copy paste without agentic coding tends to work much better.
Fable makes any IDE AI integration almost entirely unnecessary. Claude one shots pretty much everything, and fixing any small errors is easier when just talking to Claude again.
Anthropic is going to offer better pricing using their agentic harness. Why pay more for less?
An IDE at this point is best as a tool for code review. They need to start building better code review tools.
I can't quite understand the "fixing small errors is easier when just talking to Claude" flow.
I tried having it write some tests today. It got very close to what I want, but picked a stupid set of input values (two fields that look independent that should only be used with related values). I thought about "how do I explain this" and then just went in and fixed it myself.
How is it easier to write "Okay, go back to testBlah and change xxx to yyy" versus clicking on XXX in the IDE and typing YYY by hand? Maybe if you had 500 faulty tests and were forbidden from using search-and-replace for some reason.
It makes sense when code generation is the limiting factor, but I end up with a lot of changes where the actual code delta is smaller than the necessary prompt to convince the bot to produce it.
1 reply →
Some of us are working on things that Claude can't one shot. Like, not even close.
Also https://xcancel.com/mitchellh/status/2066657032938442833#m
I really don't see IDE's going out of fashion anytime soon.
> Claude one shots pretty much everything
What?
> An IDE at this point is best as a tool for code review.
I heard from a friend that most devs building serious stuff still write code. It's shocking but true. (No code review needed.)
the reason to use cursor nowadays isn't the IDE (though it's helpful perhaps once a week), but how it makes running models from multiple providers trivial out of the box. I don't have to juggle keys or drop to a shell tool call, it supports calling out to e.g. gemini in a subagent natively. I have multiple models cross-reviewing plans and diffs as a matter of course.
claude code was seriously annoying with the flickering, maybe it's fixed now, I don't know.
cursor also has a (bad) cli if you need it, it seems it's mostly used to setup remote agents, but it does the job in a pinch.
OpenCode and Pi do those things as well, and without a whole annoying IDE bundled in.
OpenCode is miserable from a security perspective. Well clarification the plans they offer where they bundled in free models that train on your use. You are then left to use an OpenRouter which I find pretty flaky for at least the leading Chinese models.
4 replies →
For what it's worth, flickering in CC has been fixed since around the beginning of the year.
I still saw a lot of flickering in VS Code (I simply use CC as a terminal in VS Code, without the plugin) as of 2 weeks ago. I think it's a combination of CC bugs + Electron(?) rendering the VS Code uses for terminal.
Moved on to Zed (native Rust rendering) 2 weeks ago -> nothing flickers.
Sadly, with Fable 5 cutoff, I am actively exploring CC alternatives. Pi/OMP.sh works great as an agent (definitely better than CC). GPT is seemingly not as good as Opus, but with better agent and better skills, it probaly won't matter anyway. GPT lets you use any agent on Pro subscription.
Maybe flickering, but it's still broken in various ways. Only a few days ago I had an issue where the text I was typing was outside of the textbox frame. Resizing the terminal still maintained the broken view.
The rendering still breaks many times a day for me, in fairly catastrophic ways. Usually because I have the audacity to resize my terminal window.
Ctrl+c -> new tab -> `claude —resume` is deeply ingrained at this point.
It's curious that the person claiming LLMs will soon skip code entirely and go straight to binary is willing to spend $60bn on Cursor.
I’m sure he has a good reason
On the flipside, I enjoy Cursor now and came back to it after leaving it over a year ago. The 2.5 model is fast as hell and very good. And whatever harness they have it's terrific, great results. I also really enjoy the fact that I can open my website in the Cursor in-app browser and just click and reference stuff. It's a really cracked workflow. The models can only get better for them.
I would also add that Cursor's "Debug" harness is incredible. Hit "Tab" in the AI editor to Tab through the options (Plan, Multitask, Ask, etc.)
If you do any kind of on-device work, it will spin up a local HTTP log server, and pipe logs from your real device (phone, hardware, etc.) to the server and do realtime debugging.
Claude will mostly guess, have you copy + paste logs, etc.
this
> I can open my website in the Cursor in-app browser and just click and reference stuff.
I’ve never used cursor and have only seen it in a couple work lunch and learn demos. I’ve never seen that feature. I have a lot of use cases where I’m asking cc to move a widget down a little bit or make a data table full width etc. Being able to reference the actual UI would be useful.
Also C++ engineer, but from my perspective, for large tasks, agentic coding is still lacking no matter how well I describe desired output. So in that cases I fall back to manual coding and cursor tab helps a lot with boring parts
Companies with large C/C++ codebases should sell AI companies the right to train on their code for $$.
Define "large tasks".
I actually don't let AI take on large tasks beyond test writing and refactoring helper scripts/utils. I keep it on a very short leash for driver/middleware code since the quality bar needs to be extremely high for our codebase. Up until recently I didn't even trust it for that, but some experiments show it's fairly good and even detected issues outside of the refactored functions which I did let it touch. This is with a good amount of 'thought engineering' though where I try to think hard about how to emphasize certain factors and define the problem as best I can.
I've used AI but not through Cursor to implement a high-performance serialization library using expression templates. Non-trivial and few kLoC targeting a soft-realtime and critical system. Would you consider that a large task?
It is possible to use Cursor via ACP, so you can use it in any editor that supports ACP (notably the JetBrains IDEs). Our company went all in with Cursor and at the same time centrally disabled the AI functionality of JetBrains IDEs, but a pretty large group of developers (me included) were so vocal about wanting to continue to use our "old" IDEs that IT eventually relented and enabled the plugins needed to support Cursor.
You know you can open the same project in cursor so agent does its own stuff and then opens JetBrains IDE to do your code navigation etc. ?
I am pissed off by people calling Cursor an IDE … Cursor is text editor with AI agents bolted on. I still like what agents do and how the context is managed in Cursor but it is far far away from proper IDE.
Dunno, Cursor's agents are now more-less equal to Claude Code, just the workflow is slightly different. I like the IDE integration for some projects, allowing me to quickly inspect/review/change/search code, while running Claude Code/Codex/OpenCode/Pi/Hermes on different projects often with local models and it's mostly a question about your personal development style instead of inherent tool capabilities.
Cursor also seems to be doing something with the Claude models that makes it way slower and less efficient as times goes by.
Or it could be just Claude CLI doing something very well.
What are you saying is going to be over in a year or so?
Right now I think there is an edge to how you construct prompts and config files. There is a large difference between "modify f() to do..." and "modify f() to do... Review the current variables and make sure they are still used consistent with their naming. Look for unreachable and dead code. Examine callers and called functions for side effects from the introduced changes...".
I don't think that will make much difference in a year.
I'm increasingly convinced of the opposite. IMO Fable was pretty similarly capable for my day to day work as Opus.
I think there's a pretty good chance that we've reached the point of diminishing returns, for our specific use case.
There are still like a billion other (more difficult) use cases to be tackled, but I think "generating code" has gotten really good to the point where the other bottlenecks will prevent further exponential progress on this specific task.
That's not going away.
7 replies →
Not OP, but I generally agree. Models are powerful enough now to reliably instruct other models. They don’t need fancy tools or IDEs, just the command line.
With deterministic workflows, type-safe languages and test suites, agentic loops pretty much “can’t fail”. They will continue until the types resolve, the tests pass, and the project requirements are deterministically met.
By that point it’s literally just a case of typing a prompt in to a text field, and waiting.
"project requirements are deterministically met" makes it sound so easy
It works great in dynamic languages as well. Static typing is mostly to aid the IDE. In dynamic languages you can infer the type by looking at the code, and LLM are good at that.
This seems true to me in theory, but not in practice.
[dead]
Same path as you. Went from $60 cursor plan (often exceeding it which costed more in API) to a limitless $100 codex plan where I basically say "read the markdown and implement the instructions". Deepseek also works quite well, surprisingly!
(FWIW Im mostly using python for OCR, LLM calls, data analysis..)
I think I'm late to the party with cursor but I don't use it as an editor at all, I keep VS Code open on another screen for that. All I do in there is agent sessions. I would be open to something else but all the comparisons I see are out of date and talk about the IDE a lot.
The comparison is with Claude Code and codex (and open harnesses like opencode and Pi). IMO they are both better, if you aren't interested in the IDE functionality.
I like your take and think the key takeaway is that there is no single answer for everyone. It’s like eMacs vs vim.
My one question is what popups exist in cursor? It is my daily driver and I cannot recall any popups.
The code suggestions. It's highly distracting and pulls me out of my flow. I know how to code and I don't mind typing. I don't need AI making trivial suggestions. I want it to do exactly what I tell it to do.
You can turn that off.
2 replies →
I like cursor, but I'm assuming they're talking about how it hijacks your tab key. It's amazing when it works, and infuriating when I just want to insert a damn tab!
Maybe that is it and agree.
You can disable that.
Composer is fairly decent. Many people aren’t in the market for an IDE — and a subpar one at that —, but they could sell API access to Composer itself.
"Prompt "engineering" and working around your tools will be over in a year or so."
What do you mean by that? What is happening in just over a year or so?
I think Fable gave a bit of a sneak peek into the future.
My objective KPI: for the few days I was using Fable (18hr a day), it would frequently push back against my design ideas and propose alternatives -- and they almost always felt better to me. Back to Opus now, still 18hr days - and I dont think it disagreed with me meaningfully even once since Saturdy. I consider myself and old hand -- and i think Fable really didn't need me to be very specific in my prompts, it would have done a good job regardless, or even despite my prompting.
Of course whether this is the future is anyone's guess. Maybe we will experience a butlerian jihad and there won't be any prompting whatsoever for completely different reasons :-)
Remember to go outside once in a while, my dude
1 reply →
The models are getting better at agentic coding, so over time using complicated harnesses and precise prompt engineering to attempt to squeeze out an extra X% performance will become irrelevant as the models approach expert-level performance. The bitter lesson in miniature.
there will always be a difference between the general capabilities, and the particularities of your exact environment and requirements.
Closing this gap is done in the harness, either through Skills, user behaviour/prompts , Agents.md etc etc.
I think that this is an area worth investing time in, but it is indeed hard to know what the scope of this is.
>> Fwiw I am a c/c++ systems engineer. I think anyone mentioning anecdotal experience like this should clarify. Maybe frontend JavaScript folks have a totally different take and that's expected.
Similar experience, having transitioned from full-stack to a dedicated C/C++ stack, learned/experienced firsthand that there is no one-size-fits-all tool.
multiple organizations I contract with have killed their cursor enterprise plans over the past several weeks
to me, this seems like the perfect time for Cursor to exit and even "Q3 completion" is too late. Deal just needs to close. Fortunately Q3 completion could mean July 1st too
Yep in my experience the weakest engs in my org are the ones still using Cursor. not a good outlook IMO
I know this is not always true. But the same people who like cursor still are the same people who are less familiar with the terminal.
And I don't know what it is but it feels the less familiar you are with a terminal, the less skilled you tend to be.
Definitely not a 100% case. But has been common in my experience
I taught myself assembly language from a book on a 286, I cracked games with SoftICE as a teenager, tried out every Linux distribution in the 90s, and have been developing software professionally for 2 decades. I prefer Cursor.
Am I an outlier or do you just judge people for weird reasons? I’ve never seen an IDE person judge a terminal person, it’s always the other way around - what’s up with that?
3 replies →
I think it's more of a sign of a good engineer. I know a number of engineers that are good and don't really work with the terminal. On the other hand, every engineer I've worked with who was a 'terminal guy' was great. I think being good with the terminal is a signal that the person is willing to 'dig in' and understand stuff at a lower level.
4 replies →
I’m very comfortable with the terminal, but let’s be honest. It’s not very good at certain apps. For example, copy/pasting long bits of code or strings into and out of Claude code is highly annoying. Line breaks in weird spots, because of the terminal, for example.
Anyways, I use cursor for a number of reasons:
1. I still want very quick access to the code in the editor. So I want the IDE.
2. Generally solid defaults. Auto-compaction, plan mode, etc, all work pretty well.
3. When I switched back to it from Claude code, it was genuinely faster at running Opus than Claude code. Claude code was grinding to a fucking halt every two minutes.
4. So annoying to search and view your chat history in Claude code. I’m a visual person. I also want all my repos loaded into a big workspace. Cursor also does that great out of the box.
5. I don’t have time to redo my terminal setup again to optimize it for Claude.
Tbh, I’m not aware of much that Claude code does that you can’t also do in cursor. At the end of the day, the agent loop and tools are not that different, and the model is identical.
The tool you use to prompt it is not the hard part. I just work faster when I have everything easily accessible in one spot, which was easier for me to accomplish with cursor than Claude. I found it just got out of my way.
Someone instructing AI through the terminal is a bit like an office worker with a tool belt. I don't think you can say anything about their coding ability until they are coding without AI. Even if thats in notepad.
3 replies →
Cursor has a terminal based app that’s just as good as any of the other mainstream ones…
2 replies →
Totally disagree. I find people still using cursor or other IDE centric flows want to review the code and be more interactive. Claude Code and Codex push agent autonomy and speed. Sorry but they go off the rails too much.
10 replies →
why do annoying engineers have such a weird fetish/superiority complex about the terminal. Its an inherently inferior UI. Theres absolutely nothing you can do in a terminal that you cant do in a GUI, and every TUI is just jumping through insane hoops to support functionality thats trivial in a GUI.
Why on earth would you want to look at a code diff in a terminal? Why on earth would you want to use weird bespoke keyboard shortcuts to navigate sub-agents in a TUI session. Why on earth would i not want the ability to open/edit a file manually in the tool im using to write code.
can someone please explain this to me?
14 replies →
Honestly the TUI in most of these coding agents is so fancy I have trouble thinking of them as "terminal". I use Pi Coding Agent and the fact that it's terminal means it's easy to run inside something properly sandboxed in a YOLO mode using normal bash commands instead of relying on individually sandboxed tools.
Once I got the tmux settings for proper scrolling and whatnot it feels fine. Honestly the TUI of tmux is the one that really enrages me - so much complexity for just "I want to switch terminals on my remote".
2 replies →
why do annoying engineers has such a weird fetish/superiority complex about the terminal. Its an inherently inferior UI. Theres absolutely nothing you can do in a terminal that you cant do in a GUI, and every TUI is just jumping through insane hoops to support functionality thats trivial in a GUI. And guess what, you can just open a terminal in cursor! who knew!?
Why on earth would you want to look at a code diff in a terminal? Why on earth would you want to use weird bespoke keyboard shortcuts to navigate sub-agents in a TUI session.
can someone please explain this to me?
6 replies →
I don’t think mapping tooling to ability makes sense here, particularly when the “advanced” tools here just abstract more away, though I agree that Cursor is terrible. So many useless windows.
Opposite. The weakest engineers trust CC or codex, stopped reviewing the code and push slop PRs. Those still acting in the loop move faster with better architecture and coding patterns and aren't losing their skills.
You must be a joy to work with.
I hate to be the one to break it to you but the weakest engineers are going to be producing just as much value
>That said, I think we're in a narrow window of time right now where any of this matters. Prompt "engineering" and working around your tools will be over in a year or so.
How so?
As previously C system programmer, I barely use IDE, cli agent for coding and desktop codex for various non coding tasks. Nowadays settled to codex/gpt5.5 and it does really good job
I didn't like cursor when it first came about but now I use it for my personal projects. The plan is good value for accessing different sota models occasionally for planning. Composer is actually really good, and fast.
I'm not sure if it's because my personal projects are small enough I know them inside out and my work project is huge, but I prefer terminal code agents for day work over ide integration.
i moved all my AI coding over to claude code when claude 4 came out, but kept cursor for the tab complete. since opus 4.5 i haven't really needed the tab complete so i canceled my cursor sub 6 months ago.
switched back to vscode so i'm not exposed to the potential mess that is openvsx too. trying to get used to zed but i'm just so used to vscode
Also using codex as a full time partner these days. What do you think happens in a year or so that changes the way it works around the tools? It becomes the only tool we interact with, and it assumes control over the others?
I recently made an npm package with a small C helper that runs in the background. The JS/TS code is 99.9% unit test covered and for sure "cleaner" code. Just my opinion though.
Could you clarify what you mean by “…will be over in a year or so”. Genuine question. Is it that models will be so good that none of this matters or we will need to go back to older ways?
Cursor is mostly no longer an editor. By default it now opens an agent window only, you have to click a few buttons to actually edit files yourself.
My experience exactly... minus c++
Cursors target users are not developers but casual vibe coders.
Literally the opposite is true. Being a text editor at its core, and by spending a lot of effort refining the human-AI pair programming experience, Cursor makes sense for someone who wants to lead code development with AI being a speed multiplier and a team member.
Tools like CC are best suited to vibe coding.
I primarily use Cursor, compared against Claude and haven't used Codex before - to me the benefits:
- Composer 2.5 is cheap, fast, and very effective; I don't even use other models that much anymore, as it's usually marginally better for way more cost, though sometimes I do for specific things like making better translations for our app than a coding-specific model could normally output
- It makes setting up and maintaining Cloud Agents super easy, the agent can basically set up itself and if anything changes that makes it not update properly, then it tells you and can fix itself easily
- Easy to move agents from remotely in the cloud to local and vice versa
- Easy to work with agents via either comments on GitHub, or via the web app on my phone (though it is relatively constrained relative to the actual desktop UI, which is a bummer)
- Code reviews with Bugbot is surprisingly good now vs when it first came out, as is the Security Agent, while being an order of magnitude cheaper than stuff like Claude reviews
- Automations are easy to configure and manage - crons, in response to repo events, etc. For example I don't use Renovate or Dependabot much anymore since LLMs can update deps and investigate subtle breaking changes much better than a dumb version bump script can
- Limits are obvious rather than Anthropic's mysterious quota amount that they don't explain at all
- Queueing up messages rather than the agent taking in new messages mid-work and then trying to mesh them together somehow - I find queueing much more predictable and easier to work with
- Plan mode is good too, but not particularly different than any other agent
- Easy to jump into the Editor view and actually go in and manually code things or interactively code with the LLM when you need to, since sometimes LLMs just suck at doing certain things autonomously. I'm not in the "stop coding bro" camp, I still like to take the wheel fairly often.
Oh, you should try OpenSpec !
Same.