I've been running Claude Code in my Cursor for a while now via extension. I like the setup, and I direct Claude on one task at a time, while still having full access to my code (and nice completions via Cursor). I still spend time tweaking, etc. before committing. I have zero interest in these new "swarms of agents" they are trying to force on us from every direction. I can barely keep straight my code working on one feature at a time. AI has greatly helped me speed that up, but working serially has resulted in the best quality for me. I'll likely drop Cursor for good now and switch back to vanilla VsCode with CC.
Man, I wish they'd keep the old philosophy of letting the developer drive and the agent assist.
I feel like this design direction is leaning more towards a chat interface as a first class citizen and the code itself as a secondary concern.
I really don't like that.
Even when I'm using AI agents to write code, I still find myself spending most of my time reading and reasoning about code. Showing me little snippets of my repo in a chat window and changes made by the agent in a PR type visual does not help with this. If anything, it makes it more confusing to keep the context of the code in my head.
It's why I use Cursor over Claude Code, I still want to _code_ not just vibe my way through tickets.
My guess would be this is less driven by product philosophy, more driven by trying to maximise chances of a return on a very large amount of funding in an incredibly tough market up against formidable, absurdly well-funded competitors.
It's a very tough spot they're in. They have a great product in the code-first philosophy, but it may turn out it's too small a market where the margins will just be competed away to zero by open source, leaving only opportunity for the first-party model companies essentially.
They've obviously had a go at being a first-party model company to address this, but that didn't work.
I think the next best chance they see is going in the vibe-first direction and trying to claim a segment of that market, which they're obviously betting could be significantly bigger. It's faster changing and (a bit) newer and so the scope of opportunity is more unknown. There's maybe more chances to carve out success there, though honestly I think the likeliest outcome is it just ends up the same way.
Since the beginning people have been saying that Cursor only had a certain window of time to capitalise on. While everyone was scrambling to figure out how to build tools to take advantage of AI in coding, they were one of the fastest and best and made a superb product that has been hugely influential. But this might be what it looks like to see that window starting to close for them.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
How would they make money from the tokens then haha? The main revenue driver of these companies is to get people to use more tokens. That’s what they will optimise for. Getting the developers out of the way is the way to do it.
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?
Nope. Enterprise you pay for seat to access all of the enterprise features and then you just pay for tokens as you go. Vast majority of their actual revenue comes from enterprise and their revenue is just api pass through to the model providers.
AI labs think they’re building an autonomous replacement for software engineers, while software engineers see these systems as tools to supplement the process of software engineering.
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 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.
Agreed completely on this (as a heavy daily user of Cursor). It's been the perfect in-between of coding by hand (never again!) and strictly "vibe coding" for me. Being able to keep my eyes on all the changes in a "traditional" IDE view helps me maintain a mental model of how my systems work.
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).
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).
That's good to hear, I might have jumped a little too quickly in my opinion. It's a bit of a Pavlovian response at this point seeing a product I very much love embrace a giant chat window as a UX redesign haha.
I would love to see more features on the roadmap that are more aligned with users like us that really embrace the Cursor 2 style with the code itself being the focal point. I'm sure there's a lot you can do there to help preserve code mental models when working with agents that don't hide the code behind a chat interface.
I agree. I am building www.propelcode.app for this exact reason.
I get the temptation of letting agents do everything. But they create really bad systems still (bad architecture, reimplementation of solved problems etc).
I also get the temptation for beginners and think it’s great that more people are empowered to build software but moving entirely to chat means they won’t learn and level up which in the long run limits their ability.
I could be wrong. And my way of thinking is dying but thankfully I can build the tool I want.
Why I harp on owning your stack instead of outsourcing your Ai experience and interface to Big Ai. There are many frameworks that make this much easier today. I chose ADK which is more of a lift, but also works for non-coding use cases.
No per-agent auto-worktree? This is the killer feature of Conductor, having to type `/worktree` into every new chat isn't really a resolution. Not even sure what selecting 'Worktree' for a new chat does
1. Cursor is multi-model, meaning you can use at least a dozen different models.
2. Cursor's UI allows you to edit files, and even have the good old auto-complete when editing code.
3. Cursor's VSCode-based IDE is still around! I still love using it daily.
4. Cursor also has a CLI.
5. Perhaps more importantly, Cursor has a Cloud platform product with automations, extremely long-lived agents and lots of other features to dispatch agents to work on different things at the same time.
I hope this comes off as constructive criticism, but I'm confused about what cursor is now.
Cursor is an IDE and an agentic interface and a cli tool and a platform that all work locally and and in the cloud and in the browser and supports dozens of different models.
I don't know how to use the thing anymore, or what the thing actually is.
I'm having the same issue, as a former Cursor user and current Claude Code addict. CC is a very clear mental model. So is "agent in your IDE," like Cursor used to be and Xcode is now. The advantage of my current setup is that it's the terminal and Xcode, just as it has been for over 20 years.
I applaud Cursor for experimenting with design, and seeing if there are better ways of collaborating with agents using a different type of workspace. But at the moment, it's hard to even justify the time spent kicking the tires on something new, closed source and paid.
I would switch to Cursor 3 in a heartbeat if it supported Claude Agent SDK (w/ Claude Max subscription usage) and/or Codex the way that similar tools like Conductor do
And I would happily pay a seat based subscription fee or usage fees for cloud agents etc on top of this
Unfortunately very locked into these heavily subsidized subscription plans right now but I think from a product design and vision standpoint you guys are doing the best work in this space right now
Is there going to be any more development on the frontier of cursor tab completion and features like that (more focused on helping engineer's with llm's for complex tasks) since I feel this is the main reason I dont use claude code or codex. I want to be writing the code, since I want performant, small, codebases that I understand (I am writing eBPF stuff, so agentic coding doesnt work that well)
For $20 a month, I can plan and implements a couple features in 4 hours with Claude. Then I have to wait.
For $20 a month, I can plan and implement thousands of features using Composer 2 or Auto with Cursor. The usage limits are insanely higher. Yes, the depth of understanding is not Opus 4.6, but most work doesn't need that. And the work that does need it I pass to Claude.
I can code 8 hours a day using LLMs as my primary driver spending just $40 a month.
Brand recognition. Since "model-is-the-service", various previously-interesting companies become thin API resellers and the moat is between "selling a dollar for fifty cents" and Brand awareness.
I am not saying this in bad faith. Model companies cannot penetrate every niche with the same brand recognition as some other companies you would consider as "API resellers" do.
I kinda quit using it. The tab feature is useful when making minor or mundane changes, but I quite prefer the codex GUI if I am going to be relatively hands off with agents.
Every company I've worked at has still had a few engineers who insist on working exclusively in the CLI with vim/emacs prior to AI. Every other engineer used some flavor of a desktop app ranging from more minimal editors to incredibly complex IDEs. I expect we land back on UIs long term.
I won’t, but it does have a couple features Codex lags, including remote SSH (huge, because the easiest way to sandbox your agent is to put it into a VM), and the ability to kicking things of on your mobile and finishing up on your desktop (again, really nice if you get a good idea out on a walk, or while talking to a colleague.
These are features I am sure Codex will soon have, of course.
Then there is the advantage of multiple models: run a top level agent with an expensive model, that then kicks of other models that are less expensive - you can do this in Claude Code already (I believe), but obviously here you are limited to something like Haiku.
Did you consider IntelliJ, even just the community edition?
If not you really should. IntelliJ with Java is one of the best dev experiences I've ever had. I'm a VSCode fan for most other things but for Java I wouldn't even remotely consider using it over IntelliJ if I had the option :-)
If you're in the market, OpenCode is quite good and has become my daily driver. You may also consider pi[0], but that's (from what I've heard) more agenty.
I love Cursor. As a Product Manager who's not really had coding experience, it's been very useful. I'm able to have a browser on the side and make changes easily, and click through exactly what I want to change rather than having the LLM guess which component I'm talking about. Having multiple models has also been great, as well as the MCP integration. Most times I don't need all the MCPs, but I like being able to turn them on or off based on what I'm doing, like JIRA or Grafana.
One of my favorite startups and I genuinely like to keep subscribing to them.
Daily cursor user who's been previewing this a bit while it was in alpha.
I think it's a really solid release, and while cursor seems to have fallen out of the "cool kids club" in the past three months it remains the most practical tool for me doing AI-first work in a large production code base. The new UI works better in a world where agents are doing most of the work and I can hop back into the IDE interface to make changes.
We've set up a linear integration where I can delegate simpler tasks to cloud agents, and the ability to pick that work up in cursor if I need to go back in forth is a real productivity boost. The tighter integration with cloud agents is something I've been hoping for recently.
I appreciate not being tied at the hip to one model provider, and have never loved doing most of my work from the command line. I was on vs code + meta's internal fork of it for years prior to the current AI wave, so that was a pretty natural transition. I'm pretty optimistic on cursor's ability to win in the enterprise space, and think we're going to see open source models + dev tools win with indie devs over things like claude code as costs start getting passed down more and the gap between frontier models and open source gets tighter.
Funny how in this space, once a company feels dead, you don’t even check out their release if the video looks decent, it would have to be totally revolutionary.
so just like how every chat app has to look like slack, every ide has to look like vscode, now every agent workspace has to look like the codex app? codex app, antigravity, and now this all have the exact same UI design...
What is Cursor doing? They need to relax a little bit. Recently I saw they released "Glass" which WAS here: https://cursor.com/glass, now just redirects to /download.
Is "Cursor 3" == Glass? I get they feel like their identity means they need to constantly be pushing the envelope in terms of agent UX. But they could stand to have like an "experimental" track and a "This is VS Code but with better AI integration" track.
Glass was a codename while the UI was in early alpha with testers. It redirects to download now because there is no special link anymore. It's just part of Cursor 3 itself.
Cursor is so good for what I do is that I've cancelled my Cursor subscription and went back to VSCode (w/o Copilot) for the diff review and code navigation.
No they are not. Tired of this 40 year old terminal setback instead of having real and beautiful GUIs. Its fine for some kind of people but don't think what works for you is acceptable for the other 50% of us.
So funny , I remember their talk about re-imagining their editor for the future of agents. They end up copying codex gui lol.
These AI companies are running out of ideas, and are desperate.
I can't imagine investing in companies that are 3 month behind open source alternatives, and their target audience being the most experimental kind there is.
Maybe I'm old, but I only recently started using Gemini to assist me in coding. Now it seems everyone is heading to giving agents to do the full-blown coding. I guess if the result code is good, it doesn't matter who's coding (me or AI).
But are they affordable already for developers who don't earn a Silicon Valley salary? Developers in 3rd world countries?
I'm not convinced people who are doing real work on production applications with any sizable user base is writing code through only agents. There's no way to get acceptable code from these models without really knowing your code base well and basically doing all the systems thinking for the model.
Your workflow is probably closer to what most SWEs are actually doing.
This, at least for me, has changed in the past six months. Which is the same thing people were saying in the months prior to that, so I will accept some eye rolls. But at least for our pretty large monorepo opus + a lot of engineering work on context got us to a point where a large portion of our engineers are doing most of their work with agents first and a lot of back and forth + smaller hand edits.
Thought I'd give it a try and installed the latest version. Application crashes at startup on Linux (Wayland) with: "The window terminated unexpectedly (reason: 'crashed', code: '139')".
Probably yet another instance of developers mostly testing and doing quality assurance on macOS/Windows.
Hey, sorry about that! Some AUR packages share cursor in a way that isn't forward+backwards compatible across releases. We recommend using our official AppImage from https://cursor.com/download Alternatively, please use a different AUR package that doesn't have these issues https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/cursor-nightly-bin
I really dislike this push away from augmentation and towards agents. I get that people want to be lazy and just have the LLM do all of their work, but using the AI as an augmentation means you are the driver and can prevent it from making mistakes, and you still have knowledge of the codebase. I think there is so much more we could be doing in the editor with AI, but instead every company just builds a chatbot. Sigh.
I feel like this design direction is leaning more towards a chat interface as a first class citizen and the code itself as a secondary concern.
I really don't like that.
Even when I'm using AI agents to write code, I still find myself spending most of my time reading and reasoning about code. Showing me little snippets of my repo in a chat window and changes made by the agent in a PR type visual does not help with this. If anything, it makes it more confusing to keep the context of the code in my head.
It's why I use Cursor over Claude Code, I still want to _code_ not just vibe my way through tickets.
It's a very tough spot they're in. They have a great product in the code-first philosophy, but it may turn out it's too small a market where the margins will just be competed away to zero by open source, leaving only opportunity for the first-party model companies essentially.
They've obviously had a go at being a first-party model company to address this, but that didn't work.
I think the next best chance they see is going in the vibe-first direction and trying to claim a segment of that market, which they're obviously betting could be significantly bigger. It's faster changing and (a bit) newer and so the scope of opportunity is more unknown. There's maybe more chances to carve out success there, though honestly I think the likeliest outcome is it just ends up the same way.
Since the beginning people have been saying that Cursor only had a certain window of time to capitalise on. While everyone was scrambling to figure out how to build tools to take advantage of AI in coding, they were one of the fastest and best and made a superb product that has been hugely influential. But this might be what it looks like to see that window starting to close for them.
Sometimes u need the beef of opus but 80% composer is plenty.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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).
That's good to hear, I might have jumped a little too quickly in my opinion. It's a bit of a Pavlovian response at this point seeing a product I very much love embrace a giant chat window as a UX redesign haha.
I would love to see more features on the roadmap that are more aligned with users like us that really embrace the Cursor 2 style with the code itself being the focal point. I'm sure there's a lot you can do there to help preserve code mental models when working with agents that don't hide the code behind a chat interface.
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.
I get the temptation of letting agents do everything. But they create really bad systems still (bad architecture, reimplementation of solved problems etc).
I also get the temptation for beginners and think it’s great that more people are empowered to build software but moving entirely to chat means they won’t learn and level up which in the long run limits their ability.
I could be wrong. And my way of thinking is dying but thankfully I can build the tool I want.
2. Cursor's UI allows you to edit files, and even have the good old auto-complete when editing code.
3. Cursor's VSCode-based IDE is still around! I still love using it daily.
4. Cursor also has a CLI.
5. Perhaps more importantly, Cursor has a Cloud platform product with automations, extremely long-lived agents and lots of other features to dispatch agents to work on different things at the same time.
Disclaimer: I'm a product engineer at Cursor!
Cursor is an IDE and an agentic interface and a cli tool and a platform that all work locally and and in the cloud and in the browser and supports dozens of different models.
I don't know how to use the thing anymore, or what the thing actually is.
I applaud Cursor for experimenting with design, and seeing if there are better ways of collaborating with agents using a different type of workspace. But at the moment, it's hard to even justify the time spent kicking the tires on something new, closed source and paid.
And I would happily pay a seat based subscription fee or usage fees for cloud agents etc on top of this
Unfortunately very locked into these heavily subsidized subscription plans right now but I think from a product design and vision standpoint you guys are doing the best work in this space right now
You just add this to your ~/.claude/settings.json:
For $20 a month, I can plan and implement thousands of features using Composer 2 or Auto with Cursor. The usage limits are insanely higher. Yes, the depth of understanding is not Opus 4.6, but most work doesn't need that. And the work that does need it I pass to Claude.
I can code 8 hours a day using LLMs as my primary driver spending just $40 a month.
I am not saying this in bad faith. Model companies cannot penetrate every niche with the same brand recognition as some other companies you would consider as "API resellers" do.
Every company I've worked at has still had a few engineers who insist on working exclusively in the CLI with vim/emacs prior to AI. Every other engineer used some flavor of a desktop app ranging from more minimal editors to incredibly complex IDEs. I expect we land back on UIs long term.
These are features I am sure Codex will soon have, of course.
Then there is the advantage of multiple models: run a top level agent with an expensive model, that then kicks of other models that are less expensive - you can do this in Claude Code already (I believe), but obviously here you are limited to something like Haiku.
Still curious which ones will survive when the AI gold diggers finally settle.
I haven't used it in a decade, Im sure it has has evolved
Can’t say I miss eclipse, but a lot of the VSCode extensions seems to utilize old legacy eclipse stuff and has the bugs to match.
If not you really should. IntelliJ with Java is one of the best dev experiences I've ever had. I'm a VSCode fan for most other things but for Java I wouldn't even remotely consider using it over IntelliJ if I had the option :-)
This change is possibly too big and unless all my existing usage patterns are maintained or improved, I’ll likely give CC a try now. Not optimistic.
[0] https://shittycodingagent.ai/
One of my favorite startups and I genuinely like to keep subscribing to them.
I think it's a really solid release, and while cursor seems to have fallen out of the "cool kids club" in the past three months it remains the most practical tool for me doing AI-first work in a large production code base. The new UI works better in a world where agents are doing most of the work and I can hop back into the IDE interface to make changes.
We've set up a linear integration where I can delegate simpler tasks to cloud agents, and the ability to pick that work up in cursor if I need to go back in forth is a real productivity boost. The tighter integration with cloud agents is something I've been hoping for recently.
I appreciate not being tied at the hip to one model provider, and have never loved doing most of my work from the command line. I was on vs code + meta's internal fork of it for years prior to the current AI wave, so that was a pretty natural transition. I'm pretty optimistic on cursor's ability to win in the enterprise space, and think we're going to see open source models + dev tools win with indie devs over things like claude code as costs start getting passed down more and the gap between frontier models and open source gets tighter.
What's the pitch for using Cursor now a days?
Is "Cursor 3" == Glass? I get they feel like their identity means they need to constantly be pushing the envelope in terms of agent UX. But they could stand to have like an "experimental" track and a "This is VS Code but with better AI integration" track.
These AI companies are running out of ideas, and are desperate. I can't imagine investing in companies that are 3 month behind open source alternatives, and their target audience being the most experimental kind there is.
Looks pretty though.
But are they affordable already for developers who don't earn a Silicon Valley salary? Developers in 3rd world countries?
Your workflow is probably closer to what most SWEs are actually doing.
At least before they were tangentially still an actual developer tool, standard vsc windows, the code was the point etc.
Now they offer really nothing interesting for professionals.