Cursor 3 (opens in new tab)

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.

Yeah, this model where you don't get an editor anymore feels like a step backwards. I don't want to give up LSPs, being able to step into/rename functions and stuff like that. I should still be the one in control of the code - the agent is the assistant, not me.

This is why Zed's direction felt pretty strong to me. Unfortunately their agentic features are kind of stagnating and the ACP extensions are riddled with issues.

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).

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.

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.

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.

> I still want to _code_ not just vibe my way through tickets.

Now we have 3 ways of coding:

* vim / emacs - full manual

* VSCode / IntelliJ - semi-automatic

* ClaudeCode/Codex/OpenCode/... - fully automated

Cursor can't stay in between

I vibe my way through my ideas. I look at LLM code sometimes to cry and cringe and then I beg LLM to have basic dignity and self respect to write code it shouldn’t be ashamed of. But then I instruct it to do something and it does it with speed I’m never able to achieve, even if the code is ugly. But it works.

That philosophy wouldnt help justify the narrative for their massive valuation.

The philosophy still works, you just have to change your view. Instead of trying to work side by side with the agent on every turn (inside of your IDE), instead the agent performs a unit of work and then you review it. You can use your IDE to view the diff, or another diffing tool.

If you've dug in sufficiently on plan mode, then what the agent is executing is not a surprise and shouldn't need input. If it does, the plan was insufficient and/or the context around the request (agents.md, lessons.md, or whatever tools and documents you use ) weren't sufficient.

EDIT: Maybe it doesn't work in cursor, but I continue to use vscode to review diffs and dig in on changes.

I just upgraded and you can still show/hide the entire editor like before

Agent is where tokens are consumed, and where they can charge you more.

> I still want to _code_ not just vibe my way through tickets.

You and I want this. My EMs and HoEs and execs do not. I weep for the future of our industry.

Exactly how I feel. If I wanted this agent-centric view without being able to easily see the code I would be using Claude Code.

I use Cursor because agents are not ready to be the ones driving. I need to drive. I still need to understand all the code (and easily browse it) and keep a close watch over what the AI is doing.

I guess they are assuming LLMs will just get better and better until youn don't look at code at all.

Ignoring the fact that software will just keep getting more and more complex and interconnected... There will always be a new frontier or code and UX

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.

> 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.

That's because that's exactly where we're headed, and it's fine.

At least these are IDEs with the save button finally gone

We needed that jump, there were still floppy disk icons

Imagine you are the top engineer of your company. Everybody wants your attention, many meetings, design sessions, and of-course code reviews.

With Claude Code, I use Gitlab for reviewing code. And then I let Claude pull the comments.

It looks like the new UI has a big focus on multiple agents. While it feels wrong, the more you split up your work into smaller merge requests, the easier it is to review the work.

Chat first is the way to go since you want the agent busy making its code better. Let it first make plans, come up with different ideas, then after coding let it make sure it fully tests that it works. I can keep an agent occupied for over a hour with e2e tests, and it’s only a couple hundred lines of code in the end.

that is what is catching the most users right? they want to vibe code their way into oblivion

embrace tradition, return to vscode

Then code.

I just wish Claude code would also offer fast inline auto complete. Sometimes I’ll just want to have a function definition or some boilerplate spelled out without waiting for the slow Claude response. Or actively switching models. ——- Maybe I can set up a shortcut for that?

This. I have effectively used multiple agents to do large refactors. I have not used them for greenfield development. How are folks leveraging the agentic swarm, and how are you managing code quality and governance? Does anyone know of a site that highlights code, features, or products produced by this type of development?

Same here. And just recently made the switch back to VS Code with CC

Also means you don't have to deal with Cursor's busted VS Code plugins due to licensing or forking drift (e.g. Python intellisence, etc)

You don't have to use swarms if you don't need them though, and in fact you can continue using the editor view with the side chat like before. Why switch away now just because this optional UI was announced?

Same setup here. Claude Code in the terminal, one task at a time. The swarm thing never clicked for me. When I'm building I need to hold the full context in my head, and watching the agent work is actually part of that. I catch things I missed in my own prompt while it's thinking. Parallelizing that would just mean reviewing code I have no mental model for. Serial is slower on paper but the code actually works at the end. I think these products are trying to capture no-coders, which is a recipe for disaster. They're trying to create architectures so people can say "build me X" and the agents perform magic end-to-end, output a hot pile of garbage. The actual value here is taking the finger-to-keyboard burden off the user and abstracting up to architect level. That means you still need to be able to review the goddamn code and offer an opinion on it to end up with something good. AI slop comes from people who don't have the skills and context to offer any valuable opinion or pushback to the AI. Vanilla CC is the best IMO.

This flow feels so slow after switching to Conductor and running X number of tasks in separate git workspaces concurrently

>I have zero interest in these new "swarms of agents"

I think you misunderstand "swarms of agents", based on what you say above. An agent swarm, in my understanding and checked via a google search, does not imply working on multiple features at one time.

It is working on one feature with multiple agents taking different roles on that task. Like maybe a python expert, a code simplifier, a UI/UX expert, a QA tester, and a devils advocate working together to implement a feature.

Try Zed instead of VSC. Thank me later.

You are falling behind if you're not pushing yourself to learn and get better orchestrating multiple agents.

Same here. Tried agent system but no. One feature. One conversation.

> have zero interest in these new "swarms of agents" they are trying to force on us from every direction.

Good for you! Personally waiting for one agent to do something while I shove my thumb up my butt just waiting around for it to generate code that I'll have to fix anyway is peak opposite of flow state, so I've eagerly adopted agents (how much free will I had in that decision is for philosophers to decide) so there's just more going on so I don't get bored. (Cue the inevitable accusations of me astroturfing or that this was written by AI. Ima delve into that one and tell there was not. Not unless you count me having stonks in the US stock market as being paid off by Big AI.)

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.

Disclaimer: I'm a product engineer at Cursor!

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.

Computer use in the cloud is the main reason I use them. It's a game changer. It has its own dev env with a browser / shell and can test what it wrote (a bit of a hassle to set it up, but when it's working, wow)

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 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.

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.

Model independence

I was a Cursor loyal until I was spending around $2k a week with premium models and my team had a discussion about whether we’d want to use more Cursor over hire another engineer. We unanimously agreed we’d rather hire another team member. I’m more productive than ever but I’m burning out.

Anyway, as a result, I switched to Claude Code Max and I am equally as prolific and paying 1/10th the price. I get my cake and to eat it, too. *Note there’s a Cursor Ultra, which at quick glance seems akin to Claude Code Max. Notice that both are individual plans, I believe I’m correct you benefit from choosing those token-wise over a team or enterprise plan?

Anyway, you’re right Claude Code is less ergonomic; generally slower. I was losing my mind over Opus in Cursor spinning up subagents. I don’t notice that happen nearly as frequently in Claude Code itself. I think it has to do with my relatively basic configuration. CC keeps getting better the more context I feed it though, which is stuff like homegrown linters to enforce architecture.

All to say, Cursor’s pricing model is problematic and left a bad taste in my mouth. Claude Code seems to need a bunch of hand holding at first to be magical. Pick your poison

The workflow that got me into Cloud Code was instructing it that whenever I create a new feature or bug, it should make a new git worktree. And then when I'm done, merge that back to main and delete the worktree. That enables me to open up three plus different Cloud Code's and work on three different things at the same time. As long as they're not directly overlapping, it works great.

I find it interesting that you are on the enterprise plan and are not default willing to pay more for more intelligence. Most people I know who are on the enterprise plan are wishing there existed a 2x intelligent model with 2x price.

the only guy in my whose code has more problems than others is the one who who uses cursor, am I missing something?

I use Zed. Much less user hostile.

I mean it makes sense for them to be somewhat antagonistic towards these flows because every time you use a different agentic extension or tool inside of Cursor, Cursor loses your money and data.

They're also churning with enterprise customers because for lots of customers on next contract renewal their pricing is increasing like 4-8x (depending on usage patterns but this was what we calculated for most of our devs) because they are slowly moving enterprise customers to usage based only plus a surcharge per million tokens, which they already did with personal sub customers, and all of the latest models are becoming Max mode only. My company is currently going through this and we've committed to way less spend with Cursor for our renewal and are signing with Anthropic and telling devs to prefer using claude code instead. I wouldn't be surprised if next year we cancel altogether and tell all devs to go back to VSCode or some other preferred editor.

I don't see a world where Cursor continues to be viable for 5-10 more years. Lots of people were originally saying "the moat is not in being an model provider" for agentic tools and thats turning out to be very much false in my opinion at least if you care about being a business.

Try Mercury by Inception. It's available as autocomplete in Zed. Last time I tried it, Zed had an API key hidden in their docs that allowed you to use it for free

The crazy thing is that it's a diffusion-based LLM. That makes it very fast, like Cursor Tab, and the outputs seem very accurate in my limited testing (although I find Cursor Tab to still feel "like 10% better")

---

That said, you should really give agentic coding a la Claude Code a try. It's gotten incredibly good. I still need to check the outputs of course, but after using it for 2-3 days, I've learned to "think" about how to tackle a problem with it similarly like I had to learn when first picking up programming.

Once I did, suddenly it didn't feel risky and weird anymore, because it's doing what I would've done manually anyways. Step by step. It might not be as blackboxy as you think it is

You might want to try this, one step ahead of Ctrl+K

Define the interface and functions and let the AI fill in the blanks.

Eg: I want XYZ class with methodFoo and methodBar which connects to APIabcd and fetch details. Define classes for response types based on API documentation at ...., use localLibraryXYZ for ABCD.

This is the way I found to work well for me. I maintain a tight grip over the architecture, even the low level architecture, and LLM writes code I can't be bothered to write.

I find tab completions very irritating. They're "almost" correct but miss some detail. I'd rather review all of that at once rather than when writing code.

My view about coding agents is that there can't be any human that types as fast as them with the same accuracy as their output, ever!

Same as it is faster to take notes with a laptop than writing manually, it is faster and cheaper to have an agent give you the code you want to type than actually typing them, manually.

how did Cursor shove agents down your throat? Even in this new version it's basically just VSCode with an optional agent sidebar

VS Code wouldn’t have won the mid-2010s editor wars if it was closed source (note that VS Code has not helped MS ramp people up to VS itself). The winner of that war was always going to be an open source editor, it was just Microsoft whose concept won out. Closed source editors like Coda failed to gain traction and even Sublime Text fell eventually.

If MS ever decided to discontinue VS Code or relicense it, there would be blood in the water. I guarantee you there would be multiple compelling competitors in under a year and probably a new open source winner with consolidation in 5.

So to answer your question: they would be forking Atom (which I think would’ve won otherwise).

Zed's not a VSCode clone, and it's fantastic and OSS. They don't really have a business model that I see working though, IMO. I pay them purely because I love the editor, but the editor is free. The AI integration is what you pay for, but I just run claude code in a terminal.

Sounds like cursor is not using vscode anymore in this release?

every AI lab have cli for agent coding. you don't need VS Code. if you want coding agent to write code for you just use cli then use any IDE, text editor or whatever you prefer to review, edit or write code.

There's also Eclipse.

What role do you play in creating software? If you don't need to see any code, should your employer consider cutting your position? I'm very much pro-humans-in-the-workforce, but I can't understand how someone could be ok with doing so little at their job.

On the face of it, "10k lines of code per hour" sounds like a ridiculous metric to the point of parody.

If you can’t understand your code, who can?

I've spent US$16 700 last month. I made an autoscaling K8s cluster for distributed compilation/caching on a large C++ project. I also heavily modified the build system to use a forked version of `siso` compatible with our environment.

That meant we can go from 17 minutes on 32 cores to 5 minutes on a few hundred. And because it's distributed compilation we don't have to provision each developer with an overpowered build system they won't be using most of the time.

It could also eliminate our CI backlog because autoscaling. Over a few hundred engineers building this codebase this probably a few thousand hours of waiting a week.

This took me about 2 weeks as someone who graduated 9 months ago. Most of the tokens were spent in several hour long debugging sessions relating to distributed systems networking and tracing through gRPC logs because the system wasn't working until it did.

I think I'd need several years of experience and 6 months as a full time engineer to have accomplished the same thing pre-AI.

Since I work at a semiconductor company near Toronto there's nobody around with the distributed systems experience to mentor me. I did it mostly on my own as a side project because I read a blog post. I literally wouldn't have been able to complete this without AI.

I'm sure the actual solution is terrible compared to what a senior developer with experience would've created. But my company feels like it's getting ROI on the token spend so far even though it's double my salary.

I think if you’re a professional and you’re actually coding for >4 hours per day it makes sense. Also if you’re one of those weirdos that likes to command an army of agents.

I've heard rhetoric like "we have to use LLMs to stay competitive now" which attempts to justify the cost

My exact reaction when they override my cmd+e shortcut and change the default layout every two months :)

The output isn't yours, and never was due to copyright law opinion.

The input isn't yours, as it is stolen and re-sold to other people.

The model isn't yours, as it was built with piracy, theft of service, and EULA violations.

What are people doing exactly... outside data-entry for free. =3

Looks like the editor is still there, and the revamped UI is a new window you can open on the side.

So unfortunately this is it for me too. I liked Cursor as a tool, but when i switched to Claude I realized i was getting WAY better value for money. I spent $1800 the month before, i spent $200 the next.

I'm now switching between Claude and Codex for less than 1/4 of what I was spending in December.

Yeah, I tried using their Composer model (which I guess is Kimi) and it just feels sub-Sonnet to me. Whereas a Claude Max sub gets me more Opus than I can use in a month.

Which sucks because Cursor is clearly better than Anthropic at building UIs. CC desktop is buggy af.

Codex is nearly Opus level though. Anyone know if OpenAI permits Max subs to be used in Cursor?

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.

[0] https://shittycodingagent.ai/

I only used Cursor in short bursts so 20 USD per month was hard to justify. I recently switched to VSCodium + Cline + OpenRouter and I can use any model I want (currently Step 3.5 Flash for "Temu Sonnet"). It scratches the itch very well for me for literal pennies on the dollar.

I should also add: Cline doesn't require any account at all. I just installed the extension and added my OpenRouter API key and that was it.

"having to type `/worktree` into every new chat isn't really a resolution"

I don't know what you're talking about. My experience with Cursor (before this new v3) is that new Cursor agent tabs / cloud agents already intelligently manage worktrees to prevent conflicts.

i would expect it before the end of the month, why not?

No it's not very good. But when you run out of Claude tokens it's perfectly fine for small stuff.

Cursor's inline autocomplete is very good though, much better than anything I could reproduce in Zed with various 3rd party "edit" LLMs (although checking google, they announced a new model since I tried it https://zed.dev/blog/zeta2)

I ran parallel prompt with composer 2 and gpt5.3 codex. Composer did slightly better, in terms of variable naming and extra tweaks to loosely related files to keep the codeb consistent.

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'm running it ok arch Wayland (sway), installed last month I think. Maybe related to your electron package.

All the VS code stuff is literally still there

> Now they offer really nothing interesting for professionals.

That's a curious statement given that what they're doing is just becoming more like Claude Code, which seems extremely popular on this forum.

> This is like people iterating on terminals before building native or web applications.

TUIs blow most modern web apps out of the water in terms of UX

It looks like they revamped the agents window. They will not remove vscode bits

Just in case all of them are forks from VS Code... I'm pretty much sure you can port the extensions (eg, I used to use VS Code, then I moved to Cursor, then to Windsurf and now I went away and switched to Antigravity but the first 3 were able to install the same extensions)

Composer 2 is great tbh. It makes my over runs of the ultra plan much less painful.

Good autocomplete for those of us who still write code.

I'm not following at all?

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.

You're missing nothing with this new ui. For me very good autocomplete + stuff than can be automated with an agent on the side while coding on the other was the peak. I want the control, control to activate/disable autocomplete and agents, I don't want to follow an imposed workflow

So your company is fine giving access to their entire GitHub to a third party, and being locked into GitHub too? If their SaaS could work with local only repo setups it would be a better UX...

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.

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.