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.
> What you mention as advantages and features is not something CC users use or require
See, this is ridiculous nonsense. I can absolutely code in Cursor without seeing the code, and I've used both extensively, and they're remarkably similar. Why would I not want to be able to paste screenshots? Why would I really not want to have an IDE for when it's time to be a Real Engineer and look at the code?
I get it if you can't code and don't know what all those funny punctuation marks mean but it's pretty helpful to be able to e.g. just select germane lines of code and feed them to the agent as context so that it doesn't have to piss away tokens finding it. I guess if you don't even know your codebase at all then you can't do that - but that doesn't mean it doesn't have an advantage to be able to do it, it just means you aren't capable :shrug:
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).
