I'm extremely interested in pushing along these fronts even in a performative way, because I don't want to get bogged down in "switch away from Emacs" conversations with coworkers. I've done a lot of modernizing on my Emacs setup this year but I would love a current take on "getting close to cursor" that gets me beyond what I'd had set up with copilot and lsp.

Having tried a bit of Cursor and some Zed I still find Claude Code a lot better than the rest (though maybe now the Claude Code Zed Beta will change things.) That means what I'm mostly doing is keeping Claude Code up in the terminal and having it do things. Claude Code has an option to view diffs in your editor which you can configure and works fine with emacs and its various diff modes (and looks great too.)

I usually always make sure everything in my branch is committed before letting Claude Code loose on my code so I can view the changes normally as a magit diff and then choose whether I want to edit any of its changes (90% of the time) or commit as is (10% of the time.) I can also restore files selectively this way and have all of my git tools available if needed.

If you want deep Claude Code integration Cursor style, then check out https://github.com/manzaltu/claude-code-ide.el . The latest releases of emacs support using `vc` blocks to specify packages so you can grab the elisp package straight from the repo and get it working within your emacs.

If you want a chat style interface, GPTel exists but requires some config (not much but not zero either) before it becomes usable as a general chat tool like Claude Desktop or ChatGPT. I'm working on an elisp package to recreate a chat interface atop GPTel and decrease the config burden.