6 ms·

Imo Cursor did had the first mover advantage by making the first well known AI coding agent IDE. But I can't help but think they have no realistic path forward.

Imo Cursor did had the first mover advantage by making the first well known AI coding agent IDE. But I can't help but think they have no realistic path forward. As someone who is a huge IDE fan, I vastly prefer the experience from Codex CLI compared to having that built into my IDE, which I customize for my general purposes. The fact it's a fork of VSCode (or whatever) will make me never use it. I wonder if they bet wrong. But that's just usability and preference. When the SOTA model makers give out tokens for substantially less than public API cost, how in the world is Cursor going to stay competitive? The moat just isn't there (in fact I would argue its non-existent)

archon810 10mo ago
As someone who uses Cursor, i don't understand why anyone would use CLI AI coding tools as opposed to tools integrated in the IDE. There's so much more flexibility and integration, I feel like I would be much less productive otherwise. And I say this as someone who is fluent in vim in the shell. Now, would I prefer to use vs code with an extension instead? Yes, in the perfect world. But Cursor makes a better, more cohesive overall product through their vertical integration, and I just did the jump (it's easy to migrate) and can't go back.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- mckn1ght 10mo ago
  Mobile developer here. I historically am an emacs user so am used to living in a terminal shell. My current setup is a split pane terminal with one half running claude and the other running emacs for light editing and magit. I run one per task, managed by git worktrees, so I have a bunch of these terminals going simultaneously at any given time, with a bunch of fish/tmuxinator automation including custom claude commands. I pop over to Xcode if I need to dig further into something. I’ve tried picking up VSCode several times over the last 6-7 years but it never sticks for me, probably just preference for the tools I’m already used to. Xcode’s AI integration has not gone well so far. I like being able to choose the best tool for that, rather than a lower common denominator IDE+LLM combination.
  - kleiba 10mo ago
    Emacs has a number of packages for AI integration which I haven't tried yet. Have you?
    - mckn1ght 10mo ago
      I haven’t, so far I’ve only looked into ones that require terminal emulation and I’ve never loved how that works in emacs.
- zaphirplane 10mo ago
  What’s an example of? The only thing I can think of is providing approval per section, but that doesn’t really scale well
  - girvo 10mo ago
    And Claude Code run inside VSCode does as well. An extension to give those extra integration features to a CLI agent to me is far better.
- gnarcoregrizz 10mo ago
  I agree. I did most of my work in vim/cli (still often do), but the tight agent integrations in the IDEs are hard to beat. I'm able to see more in cursor (entire diffs), and it shows me all of the terminal output, whereas Claude Code hides things from you by default, by only showing you a few pieces and summaries of what it did. I do prefer to use CC for cli usage though (e.g. using aws cli, Kubernetes, etc). The tab-autocomplete is also excellent. I also like how cursor is model-agnostic. I prefer codex for first drafts (it's more precise and produces less code), for Claude when less precision or planning is required, and other, faster models when possible. Also, one of cursor's best features is rollback. I know people have some funky ways to do it in CC with git work trees etc, but it's built into cursor.
- lmeyerov 10mo ago
  Now that I can do a lot with 3-6 AI agents running usefully 2-5min at a time to crank through my plans, the IDE is mostly just taking valuable space For backend/application code, I find it's instead about focusing on the planning experience, managing multiple agents, and reviewing generated artifacts+PRs. File browsers, source viewers, REPLs, etc don't matter here (verbose, too zoomed-in, not reflecting agent activity, etc), or at best, I'll look at occasionally while the agents do their thing.
- sergiotapia 10mo ago
  I don't understand what you gain by using an "integrated IDE with AI". No snark, really asking please share always eager to learn better workflows. I use VS Code, open a terminal with VS Code, run `claude` and keep the git diff UI open on the left sidebar, terminal at the bottom.
- desireco42 10mo ago
  It is very easy to open multiple terminals, have them side by side, do different things. It is more natural to invoke agents and let them do their things.
- bhl 10mo ago
  Multi-agents.
- yakattak 10mo ago
  The Claude Code integration with IntelliJ (or any Jetbrains IDE for that matter) is the perfect combination. That is the perfect world to me. An entire company maintaining a fork of VS Code just doesn't compute to me, but its how you sell it to shareholders.
  - trollbridge 10mo ago
    It's a rather extreme level of vendor lock-in.
jonathannorris 10mo ago
Yeah, hard disagree on that one, based on recent surveys, 80-90% of developers globally use IDEs over CLIs for their day-to-day work. I was pretty worried about Cursor's business until they launched their Composer 1 model, which is fine-tuned to work amazingly well in their IDE. It's significantly faster than using any other model, and it's clearly fine-tuned for the type of work people use Cursor for. They are also clearly charging a premium for it and making a healthy margin on it, but for how fast + good it's totally worth it. Composer 1 + now eventually creating an AI native version of GitHub with Graphite, that's a serious business, with a much clearer picture to me how Cursor gets to serious profitability vs the AI labs.
- nusl 10mo ago
  OP isn't saying to do all of your work in the terminal; they're saying they prefer CLI-based LLM interfaces. You can have your IDE running alongside it just fine, and the CLIs can often present the changes as diffs in the IDEs too.
  - CharlieDigital 10mo ago
    This is how some folks on my team work. Ran into this when I saved a file manually and the editor ran formatting on it. Turns out that the dev that wrote it only codes via CLI though reviews the files in an IDE so he never manually saved it and ran the formatter.
    - atomicUpdate 10mo ago
      I expect the formatter/linter to be run as part of presubmit and/or committing the code so it doesn't matter how it's edited and saved by the developer. It's strange to hear of a specific IDE being mandated to work around that, and making quick edits with tools like vi unsupported.
      - CharlieDigital 10mo ago
        This was with Rider which had its own rules for which we hadn't set up an override in .editorconfig.
gcbirzan 10mo ago
What I don't understand why people would go all in on one IDE/editor and refuse to make plugins for others. Whether you prefer the CLI or the integrated experience, only offering it on vscode (and a shitty version of it, as well) is just stupid.
- ninjha 10mo ago
  Codeium (now Windsurf) did this, and the plugins all still work with normal Windsurf login. The JetBrains plugin and maybe a few others are even still maintained! They get new models and bugfixes. (I work at Windsurf but not really intended to be an ad I’m just yapping)
  - airstrike 10mo ago
    Windsurf is at least 10x better than Cursor in my opinion... I'm honestly still puzzled it doesn't seem to get as much buzz on HN! I had to literally cmd+F to find a reference here and this is the only comment ;-;
- toddmorey 10mo ago
  Cursor if I recall actually started life as a VScode plugin. But the plugin API didn’t allow for the type of integration & experiences they wanted. Hit limits quickly and then decided to make a fork.
  - g947o 10mo ago
    Not to mention that VSCode has been creating many "experiemental" APIs that are not formalized for years which become de facto private APIs that only first party extensions have access to. Good thing that Copilot is not the dominant tool people use these days, which proves that (in some cases) if your product is good enough, you can still win an unfair competition with Microsoft.
- vedelope 10mo ago
  Cursor also has a CLI agent called cursor-agent that is quite good. It can be run in any editor with an integrated terminal.
infecto 10mo ago
I struggle with understand why engineers enjoy using these CLI coding tools so much. I have tried a few times and I simply cannot get into a good workflow. Cursor, Kline and others feel like the sweet spot for me.
- sauercrowd 10mo ago
  I dont disagree on the workflow - struggling with the same. But CLIs have an absolute sweetspot abstraction. A simple text interface, access to endless tools readily available with an (usually) intuitive syntax, man pages, ... As a dev in front of it super easy to understand what it's trying to do, and as simple as it gets. Never felt the same in Cursor, it's a lot of new abstractions that dont feel remotely as compounding
- ziml77 10mo ago
  It's really nice that the integrated nature means that, with no extra work on my part, the agent can see exactly what I'm seeing including the active file and linter errors. And all the model interaction is unified. I point them to specific files in the same way, they all have access to the same global rules (including team-global rules), documentation is supplied consistently, and I can seamlessly switch between models in the same conversation.
  - infecto 10mo ago
    That has been my experience as well. When I am prompting an agent it is using my open tabs first. When changes are made I get green and red lines and quickly can digest the difference. I don’t want it going off building a big feature form start to finish. I want to maybe use an AI to map out a plan but then go through each logical step of the implementation. I can quickly review changes and at least for me have the context of what’s happening.
- bmelton 10mo ago
  As an older engineer, I prefer CLI experiences to avoid mouse usage. The more I use the mouse, the more I notice repetitive stress injury symptoms But also, 90% of the time if I'm using an IDE like VSCode, I spend most of my time trying to configure it to behave as much like vim as possible, and so a successful IDE needn't be anything other than vim to me, which already exists on the terminal
ziml77 10mo ago
One of the biggest values for Cursor is getting all these different models under a single contract. A contract that very importantly covers the necessary data privacy we want as a business. We can be sure that no matter which model a developer chooses to use, we are covered under the clauses that disallow them from retaining and training on our conversations.
ekropotin 10mo ago
I personally use CLI coding agents as well, but many people do prefer tight IDE integration. I’ve tried every popular agent IDE, but none of them beat Cursor’s UX. Their team thought through many tiny UX details, making the whole experience smooth like a butter. I think it’s a huge market differentiator. Also their own composer model is not bad at all.
- bloppe 10mo ago
  Which ux details come to mind?
epolanski 10mo ago
Virtually anybody going all in AI is exposing itself of being redundant. I don't envy startups in the space, there's no moat be it cursor or lovable or even larger corps adopting ai. What's the point of Adobe when creating illustrations or editing pics will be embedded (kinda is already) in the behemoth's chat it's? And please don't tell me that hundreds of founder became millionaires or have great exits or acquihires expecting them. I'm talking about "build something cool that will last".
- hyperadvanced 10mo ago
  I agree. The reason Cursor’s “first mover” advantage doesn’t matter is because there’s fundamentally no business there. I’ve used 3 IDE or text editors my whole life, I’ve never paid for one. If I wanted, I could use AI to write myself a new text editor. Like you said, there’s no moat for any of this shit, and I’m guessing that by 2027 the music will stop.
tukantje 10mo ago
Cursor still has the advantage UX wise. The biggest reason I avoid using them though is their pricing structure being abysmal. I can't randomly throw credits into a pit and say "oh 2000$ spent this month whatever". For larger businesses I suspect it is even worse. If they had a 200$ subscription with proper unlimited usage (within some limits obviously) I would have jumped up and down though.
- redox99 10mo ago
  I don't understand where $2000 comes from. Relatively heavy cursor usage in my experience is around 100USD/month. You can set a limit to on demand billing.
  - hbrundage 10mo ago
    I think your definition of heavy is different than lots of other folks I know -- I'm at $1500 / mo and am actively holding back.
    - hetspookjee 10mo ago
      I had the same and switched to Claude code max and have been continuing the way of working on Opus. Now with the lower credit burn of Opus 4.5 i haven’t had a rate limit since. Imo the Claude Code token proposition and the Claude ecosystem far outweigh the benefits of cursor. This stuff is far too effective to hold back on
  - wbond 10mo ago
    I work at a company with thousands of engineers and have people hitting $200 limits in just a few days. I think the shortest was around 1.5 work days.
    - redox99 10mo ago
      I'm sure out of thousands you can have outliers, either people doing very large refactors or being kind of wasteful. Something like 90th percentile usage is what I'd call relatively heavy.
modeless 10mo ago
Tab complete is still useful and code review/suggesting changes can be better in a GUI than in a terminal. I think there is still a radically better code review experience that is yet to be found, and it's more likely to come from a new player like Cursor/Graphite than one of the giants. Also Cursor's dataset of actual user actions in coding and review is pure gold.
- girvo 10mo ago
  God cursors tab complete is woeful in basically all of my usage at work. It’s so actively wrong that I turned it off. It’s agent flows are far far more useful to me
  - hn1986 10mo ago
    Glad i'm not the only one. I use SQL primarily and it is awful and distracting
    - girvo 10mo ago
      I pair program literally all day and my coworkers fight against it haha it’s wild to watch
IncRnd 10mo ago
Cursor's cursor-agent can be run interactively from the CLI or headless.
realityfactchex 10mo ago
> As someone who is a huge IDE fan, I vastly prefer the experience from Codex CLI compared to having that built into my IDE, which I customize for my general purposes Fascinating. As a person who *loathes VS Code* and prefers terminal text editors, I find Cursor great! Maybe because that I have zero desire to customize/leverage Cursor/VS Code. Neat. Cursor can do what it wants with it, and I can just lean into that...
jammo 10mo ago
[dead]
wilg 10mo ago
I also would think Cursor would be screwed, but I tried out the Codex VS code extension and its still very barebones, and Cursor seems to update like 5 times a day and is constantly coming out with mostly great new features. Plus it is nice to be able to use any model provider.
bloppe 10mo ago
I think beginner programmers like the fact that they can just open one app and the AI chat box is right next to their editor window. Other than that, I agree that it's pretty silly to maintain a whole IDE just to attach an AI chat box to it. Now that there's MCP, the community will out-innovate anything a single company can do in terms of bolting on features. It's easy enough to get all the LSP integration and stuff into Claude code. So it all comes down to model differentiation. Can cursor compete as a foundation model creator? Maybe, but even so, that's going to be a very tough market. Margins will be razor thin at best. It's a commodity. Anyway, the last thing I would want if I were them is to keep worrying about maintaining this IDE themselves.
malfist 10mo ago
Did copilot fail so hard that it's now believed that cursor was the first?
mstump 10mo ago
Cursor is better suited for enterprise. You get centralized stats and configuration management. Managers are pushed for AI uptake, productivity and quality metrics. Cursor provides them.
xenodium 10mo ago
Also with ACP (https://agentclientprotocol.com https://agentclientprotocol.com) we can all have a native IDE/editor experience integrating agents, kinda like what LSP brought us. Even Emacs nuts like me can use agents natively from our beloved editor ;) https://xenodium.com/agent-shell-0-25-updates https://xenodium.com/agent-shell-0-25-updates
Palmik 10mo ago
I think calling Open AI Codex or Claude Code "CLI" is a bit a of minomer. It's more of a GUI, just rendered in a terminal. I honestly think a "regular" for GUI for OpenAI Codex / Claude Code could be much better.
- TudorAndrei 10mo ago
  You mean that they are a TUI
dmix 10mo ago
> The fact it's a fork of VSCode (or whatever) will make me never use it Are you sure entire opinion is not just centred around that fact? Sounds like it The UX of IDE integration with the existing VSCode plugins and file manager… it’s not even close to the same. Some people just get comfortable with what they are comfortable with

archon810 10mo ago

As someone who uses Cursor, i don't understand why anyone would use CLI AI coding tools as opposed to tools integrated in the IDE. There's so much more flexibility and integration, I feel like I would be much less productive otherwise. And I say this as someone who is fluent in vim in the shell. Now, would I prefer to use vs code with an extension instead? Yes, in the perfect world. But Cursor makes a better, more cohesive overall product through their vertical integration, and I just did the jump (it's easy to migrate) and can't go back.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
mckn1ght 10mo ago
Mobile developer here. I historically am an emacs user so am used to living in a terminal shell. My current setup is a split pane terminal with one half running claude and the other running emacs for light editing and magit. I run one per task, managed by git worktrees, so I have a bunch of these terminals going simultaneously at any given time, with a bunch of fish/tmuxinator automation including custom claude commands. I pop over to Xcode if I need to dig further into something. I’ve tried picking up VSCode several times over the last 6-7 years but it never sticks for me, probably just preference for the tools I’m already used to. Xcode’s AI integration has not gone well so far. I like being able to choose the best tool for that, rather than a lower common denominator IDE+LLM combination.
- kleiba 10mo ago
  Emacs has a number of packages for AI integration which I haven't tried yet. Have you?
  - mckn1ght 10mo ago
    I haven’t, so far I’ve only looked into ones that require terminal emulation and I’ve never loved how that works in emacs.
zaphirplane 10mo ago
What’s an example of? The only thing I can think of is providing approval per section, but that doesn’t really scale well
- girvo 10mo ago
  And Claude Code run inside VSCode does as well. An extension to give those extra integration features to a CLI agent to me is far better.
gnarcoregrizz 10mo ago
I agree. I did most of my work in vim/cli (still often do), but the tight agent integrations in the IDEs are hard to beat. I'm able to see more in cursor (entire diffs), and it shows me all of the terminal output, whereas Claude Code hides things from you by default, by only showing you a few pieces and summaries of what it did. I do prefer to use CC for cli usage though (e.g. using aws cli, Kubernetes, etc). The tab-autocomplete is also excellent. I also like how cursor is model-agnostic. I prefer codex for first drafts (it's more precise and produces less code), for Claude when less precision or planning is required, and other, faster models when possible. Also, one of cursor's best features is rollback. I know people have some funky ways to do it in CC with git work trees etc, but it's built into cursor.
lmeyerov 10mo ago
Now that I can do a lot with 3-6 AI agents running usefully 2-5min at a time to crank through my plans, the IDE is mostly just taking valuable space For backend/application code, I find it's instead about focusing on the planning experience, managing multiple agents, and reviewing generated artifacts+PRs. File browsers, source viewers, REPLs, etc don't matter here (verbose, too zoomed-in, not reflecting agent activity, etc), or at best, I'll look at occasionally while the agents do their thing.
sergiotapia 10mo ago
I don't understand what you gain by using an "integrated IDE with AI". No snark, really asking please share always eager to learn better workflows. I use VS Code, open a terminal with VS Code, run `claude` and keep the git diff UI open on the left sidebar, terminal at the bottom.
desireco42 10mo ago
It is very easy to open multiple terminals, have them side by side, do different things. It is more natural to invoke agents and let them do their things.
bhl 10mo ago
Multi-agents.
yakattak 10mo ago
The Claude Code integration with IntelliJ (or any Jetbrains IDE for that matter) is the perfect combination. That is the perfect world to me. An entire company maintaining a fork of VS Code just doesn't compute to me, but its how you sell it to shareholders.
- trollbridge 10mo ago
  It's a rather extreme level of vendor lock-in.

jonathannorris 10mo ago

Yeah, hard disagree on that one, based on recent surveys, 80-90% of developers globally use IDEs over CLIs for their day-to-day work. I was pretty worried about Cursor's business until they launched their Composer 1 model, which is fine-tuned to work amazingly well in their IDE. It's significantly faster than using any other model, and it's clearly fine-tuned for the type of work people use Cursor for. They are also clearly charging a premium for it and making a healthy margin on it, but for how fast + good it's totally worth it. Composer 1 + now eventually creating an AI native version of GitHub with Graphite, that's a serious business, with a much clearer picture to me how Cursor gets to serious profitability vs the AI labs.

nusl 10mo ago
OP isn't saying to do all of your work in the terminal; they're saying they prefer CLI-based LLM interfaces. You can have your IDE running alongside it just fine, and the CLIs can often present the changes as diffs in the IDEs too.
- CharlieDigital 10mo ago
  This is how some folks on my team work. Ran into this when I saved a file manually and the editor ran formatting on it. Turns out that the dev that wrote it only codes via CLI though reviews the files in an IDE so he never manually saved it and ran the formatter.
  - atomicUpdate 10mo ago
    I expect the formatter/linter to be run as part of presubmit and/or committing the code so it doesn't matter how it's edited and saved by the developer. It's strange to hear of a specific IDE being mandated to work around that, and making quick edits with tools like vi unsupported.
    - CharlieDigital 10mo ago
      This was with Rider which had its own rules for which we hadn't set up an override in .editorconfig.

gcbirzan 10mo ago

What I don't understand why people would go all in on one IDE/editor and refuse to make plugins for others. Whether you prefer the CLI or the integrated experience, only offering it on vscode (and a shitty version of it, as well) is just stupid.

ninjha 10mo ago
Codeium (now Windsurf) did this, and the plugins all still work with normal Windsurf login. The JetBrains plugin and maybe a few others are even still maintained! They get new models and bugfixes. (I work at Windsurf but not really intended to be an ad I’m just yapping)
- airstrike 10mo ago
  Windsurf is at least 10x better than Cursor in my opinion... I'm honestly still puzzled it doesn't seem to get as much buzz on HN! I had to literally cmd+F to find a reference here and this is the only comment ;-;
toddmorey 10mo ago
Cursor if I recall actually started life as a VScode plugin. But the plugin API didn’t allow for the type of integration & experiences they wanted. Hit limits quickly and then decided to make a fork.
- g947o 10mo ago
  Not to mention that VSCode has been creating many "experiemental" APIs that are not formalized for years which become de facto private APIs that only first party extensions have access to. Good thing that Copilot is not the dominant tool people use these days, which proves that (in some cases) if your product is good enough, you can still win an unfair competition with Microsoft.
vedelope 10mo ago
Cursor also has a CLI agent called cursor-agent that is quite good. It can be run in any editor with an integrated terminal.

infecto 10mo ago

I struggle with understand why engineers enjoy using these CLI coding tools so much. I have tried a few times and I simply cannot get into a good workflow. Cursor, Kline and others feel like the sweet spot for me.

sauercrowd 10mo ago
I dont disagree on the workflow - struggling with the same. But CLIs have an absolute sweetspot abstraction. A simple text interface, access to endless tools readily available with an (usually) intuitive syntax, man pages, ... As a dev in front of it super easy to understand what it's trying to do, and as simple as it gets. Never felt the same in Cursor, it's a lot of new abstractions that dont feel remotely as compounding
ziml77 10mo ago
It's really nice that the integrated nature means that, with no extra work on my part, the agent can see exactly what I'm seeing including the active file and linter errors. And all the model interaction is unified. I point them to specific files in the same way, they all have access to the same global rules (including team-global rules), documentation is supplied consistently, and I can seamlessly switch between models in the same conversation.
- infecto 10mo ago
  That has been my experience as well. When I am prompting an agent it is using my open tabs first. When changes are made I get green and red lines and quickly can digest the difference. I don’t want it going off building a big feature form start to finish. I want to maybe use an AI to map out a plan but then go through each logical step of the implementation. I can quickly review changes and at least for me have the context of what’s happening.
bmelton 10mo ago
As an older engineer, I prefer CLI experiences to avoid mouse usage. The more I use the mouse, the more I notice repetitive stress injury symptoms But also, 90% of the time if I'm using an IDE like VSCode, I spend most of my time trying to configure it to behave as much like vim as possible, and so a successful IDE needn't be anything other than vim to me, which already exists on the terminal

ziml77 10mo ago

One of the biggest values for Cursor is getting all these different models under a single contract. A contract that very importantly covers the necessary data privacy we want as a business. We can be sure that no matter which model a developer chooses to use, we are covered under the clauses that disallow them from retaining and training on our conversations.

ekropotin 10mo ago

I personally use CLI coding agents as well, but many people do prefer tight IDE integration. I’ve tried every popular agent IDE, but none of them beat Cursor’s UX. Their team thought through many tiny UX details, making the whole experience smooth like a butter. I think it’s a huge market differentiator. Also their own composer model is not bad at all.

bloppe 10mo ago
Which ux details come to mind?

epolanski 10mo ago

Virtually anybody going all in AI is exposing itself of being redundant. I don't envy startups in the space, there's no moat be it cursor or lovable or even larger corps adopting ai. What's the point of Adobe when creating illustrations or editing pics will be embedded (kinda is already) in the behemoth's chat it's? And please don't tell me that hundreds of founder became millionaires or have great exits or acquihires expecting them. I'm talking about "build something cool that will last".

hyperadvanced 10mo ago
I agree. The reason Cursor’s “first mover” advantage doesn’t matter is because there’s fundamentally no business there. I’ve used 3 IDE or text editors my whole life, I’ve never paid for one. If I wanted, I could use AI to write myself a new text editor. Like you said, there’s no moat for any of this shit, and I’m guessing that by 2027 the music will stop.

tukantje 10mo ago

Cursor still has the advantage UX wise. The biggest reason I avoid using them though is their pricing structure being abysmal. I can't randomly throw credits into a pit and say "oh 2000$ spent this month whatever". For larger businesses I suspect it is even worse. If they had a 200$ subscription with proper unlimited usage (within some limits obviously) I would have jumped up and down though.

redox99 10mo ago
I don't understand where $2000 comes from. Relatively heavy cursor usage in my experience is around 100USD/month. You can set a limit to on demand billing.
- hbrundage 10mo ago
  I think your definition of heavy is different than lots of other folks I know -- I'm at $1500 / mo and am actively holding back.
  - hetspookjee 10mo ago
    I had the same and switched to Claude code max and have been continuing the way of working on Opus. Now with the lower credit burn of Opus 4.5 i haven’t had a rate limit since. Imo the Claude Code token proposition and the Claude ecosystem far outweigh the benefits of cursor. This stuff is far too effective to hold back on
- wbond 10mo ago
  I work at a company with thousands of engineers and have people hitting $200 limits in just a few days. I think the shortest was around 1.5 work days.
  - redox99 10mo ago
    I'm sure out of thousands you can have outliers, either people doing very large refactors or being kind of wasteful. Something like 90th percentile usage is what I'd call relatively heavy.

modeless 10mo ago

Tab complete is still useful and code review/suggesting changes can be better in a GUI than in a terminal. I think there is still a radically better code review experience that is yet to be found, and it's more likely to come from a new player like Cursor/Graphite than one of the giants. Also Cursor's dataset of actual user actions in coding and review is pure gold.

girvo 10mo ago
God cursors tab complete is woeful in basically all of my usage at work. It’s so actively wrong that I turned it off. It’s agent flows are far far more useful to me
- hn1986 10mo ago
  Glad i'm not the only one. I use SQL primarily and it is awful and distracting
  - girvo 10mo ago
    I pair program literally all day and my coworkers fight against it haha it’s wild to watch

IncRnd 10mo ago

Cursor's cursor-agent can be run interactively from the CLI or headless.

realityfactchex 10mo ago

> As someone who is a huge IDE fan, I vastly prefer the experience from Codex CLI compared to having that built into my IDE, which I customize for my general purposes Fascinating. As a person who *loathes VS Code* and prefers terminal text editors, I find Cursor great! Maybe because that I have zero desire to customize/leverage Cursor/VS Code. Neat. Cursor can do what it wants with it, and I can just lean into that...

jammo 10mo ago

[dead]

wilg 10mo ago

I also would think Cursor would be screwed, but I tried out the Codex VS code extension and its still very barebones, and Cursor seems to update like 5 times a day and is constantly coming out with mostly great new features. Plus it is nice to be able to use any model provider.

bloppe 10mo ago

I think beginner programmers like the fact that they can just open one app and the AI chat box is right next to their editor window. Other than that, I agree that it's pretty silly to maintain a whole IDE just to attach an AI chat box to it. Now that there's MCP, the community will out-innovate anything a single company can do in terms of bolting on features. It's easy enough to get all the LSP integration and stuff into Claude code. So it all comes down to model differentiation. Can cursor compete as a foundation model creator? Maybe, but even so, that's going to be a very tough market. Margins will be razor thin at best. It's a commodity. Anyway, the last thing I would want if I were them is to keep worrying about maintaining this IDE themselves.

malfist 10mo ago

Did copilot fail so hard that it's now believed that cursor was the first?

mstump 10mo ago

Cursor is better suited for enterprise. You get centralized stats and configuration management. Managers are pushed for AI uptake, productivity and quality metrics. Cursor provides them.

xenodium 10mo ago

Also with ACP (https://agentclientprotocol.com https://agentclientprotocol.com) we can all have a native IDE/editor experience integrating agents, kinda like what LSP brought us. Even Emacs nuts like me can use agents natively from our beloved editor ;) https://xenodium.com/agent-shell-0-25-updates https://xenodium.com/agent-shell-0-25-updates

Palmik 10mo ago

I think calling Open AI Codex or Claude Code "CLI" is a bit a of minomer. It's more of a GUI, just rendered in a terminal. I honestly think a "regular" for GUI for OpenAI Codex / Claude Code could be much better.

TudorAndrei 10mo ago
You mean that they are a TUI

dmix 10mo ago

> The fact it's a fork of VSCode (or whatever) will make me never use it Are you sure entire opinion is not just centred around that fact? Sounds like it The UX of IDE integration with the existing VSCode plugins and file manager… it’s not even close to the same. Some people just get comfortable with what they are comfortable with