It is interesting that i find composer to be one of my favorites as while it is a bit dumb it is about 100x faster than the fat boys.

Sometimes u need the beef of opus but 80% composer is plenty.

> It's a very tough spot they're in.

It's a very tough spot they put themselves into. If the goal wasn't to get filthy rich quick it would probably be possible to make a good product without that tough spot.

It's heartbreaking to write this, but I think Cursor will be remembered as the Lotus 1-2-3 of AI coding.

As these products mature people are going to see more of this stuff. These are the contours of the market. The technology is incredible but it’s still subservient to the economics of building products.

It’s the “why can’t Facebook just show me a chronological feed of people I follow”. Because it’s not in their interests to do so.

Tried the cursor a few times, apart from a fancy layer on top of VS Code, it is way too expensive to use, it runs out of credit in a few tasks. On the other hand, vs code with copilot is slower and less 'intelligent', but it lasts longer, I get more work done with it. Recently, started using opencode inside vs code, it is similar to claude code, but needs some better integration with vs code.

The cancer: growth at every cost or die.

God forbids you make a great product in a specific niche and are happy with the money flowing.

Nope, has to be more.

> They've obviously had a go at being a first-party model company to address this, but that didn't work.

I thought there was an entire initiative to build their own coding model and the fine tunes of in Composer 1.5 and Composer 2 were just buying them time and training data

You know, it’s stuff like this making me think maybe the anti capitalists have a point.

A company makes a popular product customers like, but to satisfy the VCs the company must make a product the customers don’t like but could make the VCs more money.

Not sure this is the “invisible hand” Adam Smith had in mind.

We're building DevSwarm, and it's aiming to strike the balance between agentic coding in parallel without losing your IDE. Each workspace (worktree) gets a dedicated vscode instance, and in that instance we make it easy to fire up Claude Code, Codex, etc. Would love to hear if it hits the sweet spot we're going for.

edit: https://devswarm.ai

I actually run a custom fork of Zed based on their master branch because of how stagnated the built-in agent is. Master branch Zed agent did get sub-agents, parallel threads, better thread management, and worktrees though, and I implemented agent skills and the ability to select which model to use for sub-agents for it. And with those features, I'm fairly satisfied.

This is why I use Claude Code though, it pairs well with a regular old text editor (in my case Sublime). I've always had an editor and a terminal open, plugging an AI into my terminal has been a fantastic enhancement to my work without really anything else changing or giving up any control.

did you watch the 90 second video in the post? all of this is addressed

It’s very unfortunate what direction Zed has taken. It was very fast and nice editor, that’s now infected with those “AI” features.

I'm an engineer at Cursor, can try to clarify questions here.

> I wish they'd keep the old philosophy of letting the developer drive and the agent assist. Even when I'm using AI agents to write code, I still find myself spending most of my time reading and reasoning about code.

We very much still believe this, which is why even in this new interface, you can still view/edit files, do remote SSH, go to definition and use LSPs, etc. It's hard to drive and ship real changes without those things in our opinion, even as agents continue to get better at writing code.

> I'm hoping in this new UI in v3 I can still get that experience (maybe it's just hidden behind a toggle somewhere for power users / not shown off in the marketing materials).

This new interface is a separate window, so if you prefer the Cursor 2 style, that continues to exist (and is also getting better).

> It's been the perfect in-between of coding by hand (never again!) and strictly "vibe coding" for me.

I dont think there is an inbetween. Its really hard to 'keep an eye' on code by casually reading diffs. Eventually it will become vibe coding.

Software engineers are deluding themselves with spec driven, plans, prds whatever nonsense and thinking its not vibecoding.

Isn’t Cursor’s business model mostly subscriptions? They’re the ones paying for inference, not the user directly, right? So wouldn’t they be incentivized to minimize token usage per unit of user value, not maximize raw tokens?

Does Cursor make money from tokens?

I thought it was primarily a user of Anthropic and OpenAI APIs, so the fewer tokens you use to accomplish a task, the higher their margin.

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.

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.

You don't have to stop using the IDE just because you are using Claude Code. Using both at the same time is best of both worlds in my experience.

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.

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 run Claude Code from Zed. Very nice experience.

> AI labs think they’re building an autonomous replacement for software engineers

And management everywhere is convinced that thats what they are paying for. My company is replacing job titles with "builder". Apparently these tools will make builder out of paper pushers hiding in corporate beaurcarcy. I am suddenly same as them now per my company managment.

Yeah that's the disconnect though right? Even with the best frontier models, you need to do a lot of system design work, planning, and reviewing before you can let these models run.

These models are infinitely more effective when piloted by a seasoned software engineer and that will always be the case so long as these models require some level of prompting to function.

Better prompts come from more knowledgeable users, and I don't think we can just make a better model to change that.

The idea we're going to completely replace software engineers with agents has always been delusional, so anchoring their roadmap to that future just seems silly from a product design perspective.

It's just frustrating Cursor had a good attitude towards AI coding agents then is seemingly abandoning that for what's likely a play to appease investors who are drunk on AI psychosis.

Edit: This comment might have come off more callous than I intended. I just really love Cursor as a product and don't want to see it get eaten by the "AI is going to replace everything!" crowd.

AI labs won't replace all of the engineers, while engineers becoming more productive, leads to smaller team sizes.

Cursor CLI exist - https://cursor.com/cli

Saying it can't stay in between is like saying a company can't sell both regular bikes and electric bikes. Or bikes that can do both.

There are some critical parts of architecture where sometimes I really do need to see the code and even sometimes put a wall around it and tell the agent they can't touch it.

Why?

Are you saying they can’t compete with VS Code in the semi-automatic space?

Works until you discover subtle bugs hiding behind ugliness.

They're targeting the 90% of code that doesn't really need to be looked at. Software is already so complex and interconnected that it is fully beyond human capabilities, each person only knows a tiny part of the stack. If you create your own full system from scratch, it's not going to be very generally useful.

NASA vibes all its note taking apps