Cursor 1.0

Cursor is essentially only the wrapper for running agents. I still do my heavy lifting in Jetbrains products.

It actually works out well because I can let Cursor iterate on a task while I review/tweak code.

The one issue I've run into is that the VSCode version Cursor uses is several months old, so we're stuck using older extensions until they update.

[1] https://open-vsx.org/

i wrote a MCP with plugin system where you only need to run 1 instance and add plugins via config file.

https://github.com/tuananh/hyper-mcp

This is good user feedback. If Cursor is "Claude + VSCode", why do you need the other 2 open?

They don't make any money. They are burning VC money. Anthropic and OpenAI are probably also not making moeny, but Cursor is making "more no money" than others.

You can open up to three parallel chat tabs by pressing Cmd+T

https://docs.cursor.com/kbd

Each chat tab is a full Agent by itself!

Both are genuine questions.

What does this measurement mean?

1049 / (4 * 8) ~= 32 seconds, on average. Doesn't look like much waiting to me.

Hand written code needs to be distinguishable and considered at a higher priority for future code generation context

It’s called git!

Keep it short. It's enough for it to realize it needs to navigate directories.

    Cursor—the fastest-growing AI code editor in the world, reaching $300 million in annual recurring revenue just two years after its launch

Rust is easier for me than shell scripting so I started writing what I needed and remembered Zed added agent mode. I decided to give it a shot. I had it use Claude 4 with my api tokens.

It wrote the entire program, tested it, debugged it. It made some bad assumptions and I just steered it towards what I needed. By the end of about an hour, I had my complete fix plus an entire ZFS management layer in Rust.

It did cost $11, but that is a drop in the bucket for time saved. I was impressed.

Just sharing this because I got real and measured value recently that is way beyond the widely shared experience.

Also had a few misses. But in general it is ok. Still prefer ai assistant, because i can then direct the result into a certain direction. It also feels faster, it probably is not because of the manual stuff involved.

I believe it’ll get much better as LLMs start editing code by invoking refactoring tools (rename, change signature, etc.) rather than rewriting the code line by line, as this will let them perform large-scale changes reliably in a way that's similar to how software engineers do them now using IDE tools

It's also missing quite a few features still (like checkpoints, stopping the agent mid-task to redirect, etc). But the core feature set is mostly there.

Do it. I've started editing with Zed and just keeping Cursor/Intellij open on the side. (Cursor b/c of the the free student plan, Intellij for school assignments).

I feel spoiled by the performance, especially on promotion displays. I've started noticing some dropped frames in Cursor and measured an avg of 45-60 fps in Intellij (which is somewhat expected for such a huge IDE). I basically exclusively write in Zed, and do everything else in their respective apps.

That said, I do continue to think that agents are in this weird zone where it's more natural to want to interact through ticketing layer, but you kind of want to editor layer for the final 5%.

Because we're developers with things to build and we don't have time to play with every AI tool backed by the same LLM.

Like it or not, we're hitting the slope of enlightenment and some of us are ready to be done with the churn for a while.

It's just like VSC, which I was using, but it has these magical abilities. I was using it within a minute of downloading it. Unlike Cline, I guess, whatever that is.

You can use the full-context if you prefer that cost/speed tradeoff! Just have to turn on Max Mode.

Cline is great for many users, but a bit of a different product. Lots of Cursor's value come from custom models that run in the background (e.g. Tab, models that gather context, etc.).

"Cursor works with any programming language. We’ve explicitely worked to improve the performance of our custom models — Tab included — on important but less popular languages like Rust, C++, and CUDA."

Hundreds of languages supported: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/overview

You can commit checkpoints prior to each major prompt and use any IDE’s builtin visual diff versus last commit. Then just rebase when the task is done

'Connection failed. If the problem persists, please check your internet connection or VPN'

I've contacted support and they have been no help. You can see tons of people having this issue in user forums. Meanwhile, bypassing the giant monstrosity that is VScode (and then a Cursor as a fork on top of it) gives me no such issues.

So I wouldn't be so dismissive that anyone frustrated with Cursor is a bot.

I hope that I am wrong, but, if I am not, then these companies are doing real and substantial damage to the internet. The loss of trust will be very hard to undo.

You should just set aside some time to try out different tools and see if you agree there's an improvement.

For trying models, OpenRouter is a big time saver.

Now I've changed my technical planning phase to write in a prompt-friendly way, so I can get AI to bootstrap, structure, boilerplate and usually also do the database setup and service layer, so I can jump right into actually writing the granular logic.

It doesn't save me planning or logic overhead, but it does give me far more momentum at the start of a project, which is a massive win.

For more than a year, Anthropic has engaged in an extensive guerrilla marketing effort on Reddit and similar developer-oriented platforms, aiming to persuade users that Claude significantly outperforms competitors in programming tasks, even though nearly all benchmarks indicate otherwise.

- Burning tokens with constant incorrect command-line calls to read lines (which it eventually gets right but seemingly needs to self-correct 3+ times for most read calls)

- Writing the string "EOF" to the end of the file it's appending to with cat

- Writing "\!=" instead of "!="

- Charged me $7 to write like 23 lines (admittedly my fault since I forgot I kept "/model opus" on)

Minus the bizarre invalid characters I have to erase, the code in the final output was always correct, but definitely not impressive since I've never seen Cursor do things like that.

Otherwise, the agent behavior basically seems the same as Cursor's agent mode, to me.

I know the $7 for a single function thing would be resolved if I buy the $100/month flat fee plan, but I'm really not sure if I want to.

I have been using the Claude.ai interface in the past and have switched to Aider with Anthropic API. I really liked Claude.ai but using Aider is a much better dev experience. Is Claude Code even better?

What's the best about it, it's open source, costs nothing, and is much more flexible than any other tools. You can use any model you want, either combine different models from different vendors for different tasks.

Currently, I use it with deepseek-r1-0528 for /architect and deepseek-v3-0325 for /code mode. It's better than Claude Code, and costs only a fragment of it.

Once something, like in this case AI, becomes a commodity, open source beats every competition.

I still prefer Cursor for some things - namely UI updates or quick fixes and explanations. For everything else Claude Code is superior.

At least Cursor is affordable to any developer. Because most of the time, even if it’s totally normal, companies act like they’re doing you a favor when they pay for your IDE so most people aren’t going to ask an AI subscription anytime soon.

I mean, it will probably come but not today.

am i missing that much ?

This is my main gripe with it, too. It's still been semi-useful at least for some analysis and examination of our code-base, but editing and autocomplete I've not found super useful yet.

Git host doesn't really make a difference.