Historically being WW2. I'm not sure they've contributed much to the "war effort" since then.
A legacy of WW2 was the explosion of the whole defence industry. While a lot of the civilian factories got repurposed in WW2 to build trucks and planes and ships, the tech in all that stuff was very basic. For example the aircraft carrier Yorktown was "fixed" (at least good enough for the Midway battle) in 3 days. I somehow doubt a modern carrier could do that, simply because of the tech required. The US built 150 more carriers in the next 3 years.
The defense industry today gets a trillion $ a year. There's no civilian ship-building to speak of, and military vehicles are now highly specialized.
So why keep Ford et al afloat? Politically it's sold as "national security." In reality it's like more "they didn't die on my watch." And of course, having the ability to make local affects the supply chain. [1]
For example if China invades Taiwan, the US loses pretty much all electronics- especially PCs and Phones. That's a lot of leverage for a foreign country to have.
[1] US cars aren't really local - that's a fiction exposed by the proposed tarif on "car parts", which the industry squashed. In reality car parts are made all over the place (including the US) , and then assembled in the US (or anywhere else.)
Mercedes Benz and other car companies in Europe are going into defence directly as EU is investing more so any company in the engineering space see potential new market growth
> Should we get into a big war, we'll likely need mass production of military vehicles and having mass production of consumer vehicles is a good start.
And all those military vehicles we build will be destroyed by tiny fpv drones that cost a tiny percent of what the vehicles cost.
Why do people cling to this WW II era idea that we need car factories in case we go to war?
Those tiny fpv drones pack a tiny punch. Sure, it will destroy a current generation Chevy Equinox.
But two weeks after the war starts, countermeasures will be created. The vehicles will be changed to make them harder to find, and harder to kill. A small drone will be rendered ineffective by small countermeasures.
As much as I dislike the current US administration, Ford moving to making missiles and other military hardware is a good idea. They sure can't build a cost effective vehicle; yet there is a lot more potential profit in a Standard Missile, not to mention less competition.
> But two weeks after the war starts, countermeasures will be created. The vehicles will be changed to make them harder to find, and harder to kill. A small drone will be rendered ineffective by small countermeasures
Where did you get this?
Nobody solved FPV's in four years, why do you think US or any other country will solve it in two weeks?
"small drone will be rendered ineffective by small countermeasures" – only a person that lives under a rock and doesn't follow RU-UA war in any way can say such things.
I stopped using Cursor when I started getting comfortable with Codex/Claude. Cursor is just annoying with the constant popups and it's just not as good. Now my workflow is to use my normal editor, add a todo describing what I want, and then ask Codex+gpt-5.5 to implement it. It absolutely nails it. Using codex is so much more like working with a partner vs the noise and annoyance of Cursor.
That said, I think we're in a narrow window of time right now where any of this matters. Prompt "engineering" and working around your tools will be over in a year or so.
Fwiw I am a c/c++ systems engineer. I think anyone mentioning anecdotal experience like this should clarify. Maybe frontend JavaScript folks have a totally different take and that's expected.
I use cursor 8+ hours/day at work, and have full (and effectively unlimited) access to Claude Code and Codex - tools which I also use personally. I suspect that your "constant popups" were when you were using the editor - a mode that I'll confess I haven't touched in 3+ months.
Workflow in Cursor is actually awesome - I'm a little outdated in how I use it - I still establish goals/objectives, rather than managing the loop which does so - but if you can think broadly enough - I find it's pretty efficient.
Key things I like about Cursor (and I recognize I'm dating myself a bit here):
- Plan Mode is really solid - I shift-tab, have it go create the plan using whatever insanely expensive SOTA model is available - I will usually spend 5-10 minutes on the Plan - review it, maybe even tweak it a little. (though 90% of the time it's fine out of the gate)
- Ability to select any model for every task - I'll switch between Opus 4.8 High/xHigh/... I'll even switch to 1M context for the planning phase upfront.
- It does an *excellent* job managing permissions and looping the agents and spinning up sub-agents for you - you set the goal, run the plan mode - and then let it churn for however long is required - pretty common to have a 30-45 minute run and come back to a fully created/tested product.
The nice thing about Cursor (and honestly Claude Code, Codex) - there isn't really any "prompt engineering" involved. You just say, "Go Build me x - it should have y,z features - and build it in golang for me" - and that's it - the 3-4 page Plan comes back - usually pretty credible - and then you click "build.".
> there isn't really any "prompt engineering" involved
You should make an experiment; take someone who never used any LLMs or agents, and tell them to use it for the first time in front of you, and tell them to build something like a calculator program or whatnot. Bonus points if they're ICs or at least not-managers.
I think there is a lot us engineers take for granted, when it comes to communicating via text, how to state things clearly and what we think/reason when we read things. A lot of people don't have those "skills" innate, and the first time they use LLMs, they basically don't know how to interact with them, until they realize what they're able to do and not. Then they also learn what to say to steer the model into the right way, this is quite literally a "prompt engineering" skill they're now learning.
You don't even have to go outside engineers. I have teammates that get very little out of Claude Code because the way they integrate their own knowledge doesn't allow them to think of what Claude might not know. They'd say a task was impossible with the tooling, and I'd get instant answers, because I understand what is weird internal business logic sitting 6 repos away, and what is knowledge claude has by default. I can commit Claude.md files for them, but I have to include EVERYTHING, because otherwise they'll let Claude make assumptions and waste minutes, if not hours.
It's a big part of what, in my experience, is separating the very good engineer from the iffy one: Do you have a good mental model, and can you put yourself in the shoes of people sitting in a different mental model? It makes you a better dev, and even more so when it comes to AI tools, which have their own kind of alien brain.
Coding LLMs are distilling developers. It's like the old experiment where you have someone write down the steps to make pancakes and they don't tell you to crack the eggs before adding them to the batter: it takes a particular mindset to be able to make a model of what is supposed to happen and deconstruct that to the level appropriate for implementation.
Until now, the actual act of writing code: terminology, syntax, etc. was a significant hurdle, and that underlying mindset was a very useful, but missing in a surprisingly large number of developers, skill.
Now with LLMs doing the work of "translate this into code," increasingly the only thing that matters is that exact ability. And developers that don't have it or can't develop it won't be developers for long.
Thanks for putting into words what I have been seeing a lot at work and haven't been able to put my finger on. We tend to have quite diverse _workflows_ between devs at my company, and success seems to correlate with injecting better context earlier in the process.
I like to chat with Claude about how to approach a given problem, bring in extra context, etc, before even really drafting up a plan, while other people dive into implementation immediately and go on wild goose chases.
90% of the time we end up in the same place in roughly the same amount of time, and there are obviously tradeoffs to spending more time planning vs implementing. I'm oversimplifying as well.
I couldn't agree more. Socratic methodologu, domain modelling, systems thinking, pipes-and-arrows problem solving etc. These are the skills that get real work done in coding agents these days.
I'm sure that explains some of it but I really don't think it explains most of the people who have been AI-pilled in the last nine months. There was no amount of context I could give GPT-4o that would make it a net benefit to use that for agentic development. I tried it with quite sophisticated prompt systems and much simpler ones, compendiums of code & business analysis and sparser ones. Yet it just wasted my time - still there were people using Cursor with that model and saying it was life changing. I didn't have that experience until Opus 4.5 - its possible I could have had it earlier but that was when I happened to try it again.
I think many of the people who have become "AI Pilled" (I'll include myself here) had it happen in the last 3 months. Even over the Christmas break, when the Wiggums loop got so much coverage - I still wasn't that blown away going into January/February- 50%+ of the time I'd just write the code myself. I like coding.
But - I don't know if it was April, or May - but very recently - the coding harnesses paired with decent SOTA models like Opus 4.8/GPT 5.5 - just started showing a lot more consistency, and completeness, and sometimes downright clever behavior - that they started to become way more useful.
Just one out of hundred+ examples - I gave Claude Code (Opus 4.8 High) a complex task that involved consul, vault - but I had neglected to give it sandbox permission to download from hashicorp.com. So - it created a entire test harness that simulated both the behavior of Vault and Consul - created all it's test cases, verified that they passed - and when I came back 40 minutes later said that it was all done.
It's test harnesses so accurately simulated the behavior of Vault/Consul - that on first try - no refactoring whatsoever - all of the protobuf/AESGCM/API behavior (that has varied significantly between versions) - worked.
This was something that would have taken me, someone super super familiar with the code and tools and APIs - a minimum of 3 solid days of work - and that would likely involve hundreds of attempts and refactors as I unwound all the weird encryption and packaging layers. It zero-shotted a full solution without having an API to test against
If these agents actually have an actual test-harness - It's honestly hard to imagine what they can't do - subject only to imagination and budget at this point.
Speaking personally - something changed Between January and, Let's say May - in which instead of seeing these things as mostly interesting technology demonstration, in which the flaws outweighed the benefits - I now genuinely think they are the future of programming. I'm dubious that I'll write much software manually in the future - beyond what I do for personal pleasure.
Asked to write a driver for macOS for some thing that didn't have macOS support, GPT-55 found Linux OS firmware on the vendors site,
downloaded it, ran binwalk, extracted out the driver, got halfway to reimplementing it on macOS with barely any help from me. I did need to dive into it somewhat to get it across the line, but it showed some ingenuity along the way.
Some people "got" LLMs back in 2022, others needed it to evolve a bit.
It's not unlike computers. I started using them back in the 90s and absolutely nobody I knew was interested, while today everyone carries one in their pockets...
By that same logic (and I’m agreeing with you as of now), engineers shouldn’t get too comfortable treating “being good at text communication” as a lasting edge. With how quickly agentic coding is evolving, it’s worth considering the possibility that many of the prompting and steering skills we view as valuable today could become far less important in a matter of weeks or months.
Recently I have the SEO guy governing the mostly static, public site with Claude Code. He loves it but you would never imagine the level of mental illness Claude comes up with. If it were an employee I’d literally throw him out the front door, labor laws be damned. And as always, every insane thing it does is some direct echo of its concept and training.
But what's the $60B differentiator here? There are so many similar tools out there. I generally use Opencode, but also Claude code, antigravity and sometimes Kilo code on VS Studio. How can cursor be worth even 10% of 60B?
I don't know what cursors market share is but it feels like 20-25% to me. That is not worth nothing. Then;
1) The data they have flowing through the system that enabled them to build composer (which is much better than stock kimi 2.5) and is presumably allowing the training of a new model on space Xs compute.
2) Cursors new 'github' replacement.
3) Enterprise sales/traction
If you look at all of these together, it's not implausible that they end up mostly 'owning' coding in 5 years time. If they replace GitHub with something more compatible with agentic coding and bring it into their whole ecosystem providing cloud and local agents, PR review and own frontier coding model.
It's specialised vs 'borg' isn't it. One way of thinking is that the world is owned by Anthropic/OpenAI and coding is just one of many things their model and software does. Another view is we have a 'coding with LLMs' company that specialises in this field of endeavour. Hard to say which wins, but I think they have a shot.
Personally my only objection to cursor is that it's more expensive. That's it, otherwise it is great to be able to choose say GPT-5.5 when I want to work on backend and Opus when I want to work on front end. Great to have PR review built in. If they were able to get composer 3 to as good as GPT5.5 / fable at the price of composer 2.5 they'd be winning on price again.
> If you look at all of these together, it's not implausible that they end up mostly 'owning' coding
They really need to change their trajectory then?
And regardless being owned by xAI, a failed AI company which turned into a datacentre operator probably won't help them to achieve that.
> Hard to say which wins, but I think they have a shot.
The market for "coding harnesses" and "AI IDEs" is already oversaturated and they are effectively a commodity at this point, you can use any of them with any provider more or less interchangeably.
> They really need to change their trajectory then?
They need to step up progress sure.
> And regardless being owned by xAI, a failed AI company which turned into a datacentre operator probably won't help them to achieve that.
I think near unlimited access to compute is exactly what they need to train a frontier level coding model and serve it cheaply and profitably.
> The market for "coding harnesses" and "AI IDEs" is already oversaturated
I think my entire point was that it's not just a AI IDE. It's a coding focused model (currently Composer 2.5, soon hopefully something better), a Github Replacement, PR review/Bug Bot, Cloud Agents and so on and so forth. It's a ecosystem. An enterprise signs a MSA with you and gets everything they need all in one place.
Yes because Grok failed and they now have "unlimited" compute they can sell to other. I mean you are right that if they did X, Y and Z they could be very successful but their is no indication that might happen. In any meaningfully way seems like Cursor has peaked a while ago.
> An enterprise
Well either they are the type of companies which just buys whatever Microsoft is selling OR they let their developers to mostly pick what they feel is the best tool for the job on their won. I don't think there is that much in between (and its a cutthroat market e.g. GitLab)
> a Github Replacement, PR review/Bug Bot, Cloud Agents
Those things are a dime a dozen, you can vibe code them in weeks/months and there plenty of options on the market already. Well not Github of course, but there are various reason for that which have little to do with product quality and features (not that I think there are many companies which could build a meaningful GH replacement in a realistic time period despite its many flaws).
I just don't really see a huge income stream for dev tools companies (just like there never was) they can skim of something from the top by reselling AI models (generally at zero or negative margins..) but that's not the most lucrative business model when you have no real moot.
By not succeeding? It's an also ran, a closed proprietary model which is behind Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and a a bunch of Chinese companies, how do you make money with a produce like that? (besides the absurd IPO of course...)
For a lot of people, Grok is the first AI they got to use through Twitter. Grok does get quite a lot of usage, and isn't out of the game - coding tools aren't the only use case for AI.
Google glass has been discontinued? Besides, many people use it on Twitter everyday. Usage is not limited to what you can see on the Openrouter dashboard.
these users are probably losing the company money.
the failure is in converting regular people into actual ai product consumers. Companies are realising that the money is not in regular consumers but in enterprise and they are not considering grok as a serious alternative.
if anything, the name, the branding and the x/twitter affiliation has hurt adoption from money makers rather than help it.
so yes, people know it, but no one is willing to pay for it
Depends, Grok stimulates engagement and pushes to stay on the plaform and feed it data. If anything, it helped justify a massive valuation for SpaceX, which is a metric of success for most corpos.
It helped the valuation but as just like SpaceX hallucinations about the space data centres. Doesn't mean its not a crappy low end model itself. Btw is Twitter even making any money?
There's a HN article and discussion about Anthropic expanding to use Colossus 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214017 I think it's fairly clear that grok isn't using as much compute as expected.
So far seems like none of those use cases have generated meaningful income streams? The consumer/non-developer market is mostly dominated by OpenAI and Google anyway...
> The market for "coding harnesses" and "AI IDEs" is already oversaturated and they are effectively a commodity at this point, you can use any of them with any provider more or less interchangeably.
Yes and no. I've used a few different harnesses with closed and open models and there is definitely something going on that makes some harnesses work better than others. Many of the differences are hard to pin down and some are things people don't care about. But I wouldn't say they are commodified just yet.
1. Memory use. I have colleagues complaining that Clause Code uses several GB of memory. Meanwhile I haven't heard about that regarding codex or goose, or even opencode for that matter.
2. Suitability for local models. When you use Anthropic models, you use Anthropic as a provider. They can have software between the model and your harness that will fix issues with the model. One notable thing that even the best open weights models struggle with is broken tool calls. There is a lot that a harness can do to fix broken tool calls when working with a straight up ollama running a raw GGUF file.
3. Ease of use with non mainstream models. OpenCode has GREAT coverage of models/providers. Goose, less so as it relies on people to set up their own anthropic or openai compatability settings. e.g. Zed doesn't let you use Z.ai (which, if you speak British English, sounds ironic because "zed ai" isn't directly supported by Zed the editor).
4. Worktree support. Opencode and probably all the TUI harnesses works in a local directory - so you need the terminal to be in the worktree. Zed, however, works centrally on your git repo and tracks the worktrees so you can bounce around your work in a single window.
Of these, '2' is maybe the most important one but also the hardest to pin down as a feature. '3' is a one time cost. Of course '1' could be a blocker for someone using a macbook air or neo.
I agree, Composer Fast 2.5 is getting really good. I started using it for a personal project after I had to switch from Sonnet because I hit the API limits, and I was surprised by how good it has become.
I believe they have some very good training data because of all the data generated by people using the service.
This is the same data they used to finetune Kimi K2.5 to make their newer Composer models, which benchmark substantially better than Kimi K2.5.
I've heard they also want to build their own base models, which will also benefit from their large amount of high-quality training data. Which will solve Grok's model quality problem.
This is all unsourced conjecture of course. But it's what I've heard.
Also from what I understand (not my day job) we're now at the point where the post-training tuning (RLHF etc.) is increasingly important since pre training no longer scales.
So it's not really fair to call it "fine tuning", it's an important part of building a coding model in 2026, and cursor have done a pretty good job with Composer
they are paying for marketshare/customer base. Cursor has a good chunk of it.
xAI overbuilt their data centers - they can't find paying customers for them, that's the reason they made deals with other companies like Google to use their own datacenters.
Cursor has the opposite problem of not having enough capacity. So this works well for them together.
Weather it's worth it - if you beleive that AI will solve every problem then having a piece of the pie early on might be worth it.
Remember how when google bought youtube for 1.65 billions people thought they are crazy? Or when facebook bought instagram.
60B is a crazy number but might be worth it for someone fighting for world dominance :)
xai is on the line to delivery capacity they already sold to Google and most analysts think they are 50/50 on actually meeting it.
the only proof they have capacity is that musk claims all the money they are burning is going to datacenters and gpu (mostly because if he put it on anything else the lie would be obvious)
Or are they paying for talent? It seems like xAI is sorely lacking in talent, most likely due to the CEO and folks' aversion to him. By throwing around some SpaceX monopoly money he can trap some talent with retention clauses and try to invigorate his failed AI business.
I think the argument for Cursor is that it's the dominant tool that enterprises are using for coding, so the theory is Cursor wins that as the "model agnostic", it has a phenomenal Enterprise Sales Team.
From a valuation model - $4B ARR with rapid growth, and the ability to shift traffic to internal models (honestly, massive amount of the time "composer" - their internal model is fine, and obviously going to get better). Say 17x Multiple which isn't unheard for a rapidly growing Startup with solid future structural profit elements (moving to internal model) - that gets you to $68B.
> so the theory is Cursor wins that as the "model agnostic"
But there are many model agnostic harnesses out there: OpenCode, Roo, Cline, and many others. And even Claude Code can be setup to use non-Anthropic models.
As a Cursor user, I don't have to have thought about the providers behind the compute - I get name brand Claude, or cheap Kimi, or Grok, and it's all got roughly the same agentic experience, and only one bill. Enterprises love this.
If you resell something worth $5 for $5 while having to pay for R&D and operating expenses that's not exactly comparable with a company that's selling actual products.
> Say 17x Multiple
On an extremely low margin business it is, yet again that wouldn't be the stupidest thing in today's market.
It can't as long as there is plenty of AI without it.
The real differentiatior is that if $60B today turns out to be all thrown away in a worst-case scenario, it would be easily more affordable and there would be less negative impact than $47B at the time if it was all thrown away on Twitter.
We’re in the new era where startups boast about and bought based on revenue and not on just a number of users with unclear path to monetizing as it had been for the previous couple decades.
We can also note that we see Thrive Capital (Kushner) again in a win.
Where else are you going to get access to a real-time fresh high quality stream of human intelligence to grow your baby AGI? You can’t buy Codex, Claude, Copilot, so what’s left?
How are you switching between like 5 different editors lol. Bro sloppers will do anything to get their fix. Like the old people at the casino switching slot machines all day based on some occulted understanding that only they think they have.
There is most certainly still prompt engineering involved. How there can be both the responsivity to different cues like "plan this", "write this", "analyze this", "defend this", "poke holes in this", but not responsivity to the various terminology you provide in your explanations of "this", where to get information about specs/standards/requirements, what details I care about, and therefore can't compromise on, vs what details I'm willing to accept whatever the top reddit post from 4 years ago recommends.
I don't see how these systems can have the ability to be effectively expressive about all of the minutia, and not have all of the various different possible expressions lead to vastly different outcomes.
I think all of the cues that you just described are in the plan.
For example - I might (real world example from this morning):
"Create a script that installs hashicorp vault and consul, store the data on consul. Then create ahelper script that will fill the vault server with sample data. Add HTTPS support. Now write a framework that reads and decrypts the encrypted data in consul. Support old (pre 1.3) and new (post 1.3 vault). "
That generates a 6 page plan using Opus 4.8 w/1mm context, including notes on what to prioritize, what format to create the scripts in, etc... (My cursor guidance already has a couple months of hints as to what I want in terms of scaffolding unit tests, canonical linux, performance, security, etc...)
That 6 page plan is the "Prompt" - but it's entirely generated by Cursor/Opus. It's there to tweak if you want to emphasize, or provide some taste - but, honestly - it probably does a better job than I would - so ~90% of the time I just accept the plan as is.
I would say prompt engineering, in the sense of people claiming you need to include in every prompt magic incantations like "You are a senior engineer from a superintelligent alien species" and "take a deep breath and make no mistakes" doesn’t really do that much for everyday work I feel or they are all already included in the system prompt maybe. I reckon it can still edge out a few percentage points in automation.
What actually matters is the ability to communicate well in general, not anything LLM-specific. Being able to state what you want clearly and unambiguously, and having a sense for what additional information you need to dump, even when the other side claims they already have everything they need.
Yes, I tried to use Cursor as an editor. Terrible idea in hindsight.
So your workflow now looks like mine except I prefer a different editor and only use the latest and greatest model so Cursor basically offers nothing over Codex.
I disagree about prompt engineering, but it's one of those things that probably varies because of what language you use, what problems you solve, and the degree to which you care about the output. Unless I'm writing tests, I keep AI on a very short leash because I'm writing critical code used by a very large number of users. I have noticed big differences in output quality depending on how I steer AI. Without steering, it will happily leave in dead code, change the use of variables so they need to be renamed, assume or fail to assume invariants, etc. As I said in another comment, I think we won't need to do that for very much longer, but right now it seems essential.
> You just say, "Go Build me x - it should have y,z features - and build it in golang for me" - and that's it - the 3-4 page Plan comes back - usually pretty credible - and then you click "build.".
What you're describing seems like a workflow for building toys only. There's currently no reality in which someone would actually know what the y,z features are before making them. A plan generated in 5min would likely suggest a suboptimal solution compared to what a good solution would look like (which might take a year or two to figure out, for a human, so still a week or so for SOTA models if at all possible). Building something in golang is cute, but hard to be convinced until more novel applications are being generated from prompts.
The data submitted by Cursor's users tho, that seems to be very valuable.
You nailed it - in fact, most of Anthropic's early revenue came from Cursor - much of claude code programming components is essentially a feature copy of Cursor, so it makes sense they are similar.
Cursor does have it's own model - it's a heavily reworked version of KimiK2, called "composer" - that I use a lot of the time when I have fairly straightforward tasks that don't require a lot of exploration or independent thought. Lot cheaper - the Input/CacheWrite/CacheRead/Output costs of Opus 4.8 are $5/$6.25/$0.5/$25 per mm tokens, vs $0.5/-/$0.2/$2.5.
Not trying to be funny but seriously, if these tools can produce a tested 'product' in 45m, shouldn't we be seeing millions of them out there? I mean how far are we from a fully AI built Oracle ERP or even a notepad or helix?
- Note - that my "product" was about 3,000 lines of code - so tiny. But https://metr.org/ should give you some insight into the complexity the models are capable of.
- you have to be able to imagine the product. If I have the time, and energy, to imagine what I want - the model will build it. Here is an example of a much better programmer than I and something he wanted built - https://www.boatbomber.com/blog/claude-fable-5
- These are the first drafts. On average - any complex system needs about 10 years and at least 1000 active and enthusiastic about reporting users to really get robust code. Writing if via LLM doesn't (at least so far in my experience) help that much in reducing bugs if you were previously following any semblance of TDD. Lots of bugs in the code - the products you listed above have literally tens of millions of years of user experiences and bug reports that got them to where they are today. No silver bullet yet - just faster, less effort - and it enables non-technical people to create (still buggy) products.
Have you ever heard "I can do that in a weekend" and they usually can. The difficult part is not building the product, it's selling and marketing, the buisness part. It's quite common buisness tactic to outright copy someone else's product or buisness.
Millions of produced verified software engineered products in 45 minutes in the likeness of Oracle ERP or notepad++, helix are small potatoes when you see the unbounded ambitions of SpaceX in full.
The end point may squeeze quality of operations at the subminute time span for ground control environment seriously launching Starship rockets one an hour, for example.
You absolutely don't. I use all three products. My preference is Claude Code for my personal project. The one at work is kind of sandboxed off - but does have the benefit of an MCP for every enterprise service we have (Kibana, Victoria Metrics, Grafana, Jira, etc...) - which is nice.
Over time - I expect Composer will be cheaper than Opus 4.8 - but the nice thing about Cursor - you can flick between models.
And (this is purely a personal thing) - I really like the extensive collection of "Plans" that cursor tracks - there isn't really a similar thing in Claude Code - but I really like the Claude.AI interface for everything else. It's also a much better general knowledge agent - the Cursor Chat interface isn't as nice.
I’m not sure what you’re on about. I had Claude doing swarm engineering using different models. It would write specs that haiku would implement, it would check itself etc etc. with a simple phrase it goes into planning, multi agent mode, and chews on a problem until it’s done. It’s pretty autonomous.
Maybe you haven’t looked deeper into what modern Claude can do?
The Different Model approach is where from tasks to task - I can switch from Opus 4.8, GPT 5.5 and (very often) composer 2 at 1/10th the cost.
It's not perfect, btw - to some degree you are at the mercy of which models they support - currently only 27 from Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, and Kimi (Just K2.5) - presumably because they have commercial arrangements with them. The "Bring your own Model" model requires you plunk in your API key - which sucks. And only one at a time.
To the best of my Knowledge, Claude Code only supports one model at a time if it's not one from Anthropic (which will use the the entire suite of Anthropic Models depending on the task) - and you have to override it to a single model with an environment variable at startup - no ability to flick between models from task to task.
Depending on your workflow - you can save 70-90% on costs just by chosing a reasonable model for really extensive tasks that don't require thinking, max context, etc....
Different models aren’t subagents - they’re completely orthogonal. I use Gemini subagents for code review in cursor, but mostly use gpt for actual coding.
When I first used Cursor, I hadn't used any of the "Vibe Code" tools out there, so it was pretty neat to have an assistant directly tied to the editor.
Once I learned how to use Codex, I just used a tmux split with NeoVim and have the effect I wanted. I haven't felt compelled to use Cursor at work since.
I also work with C++, and I use Codex (desktop) which writes 99.99% of my code, plus Visual Studio, which is nice for reading and navigating code. For webdev I do VSCode + Codex.
I started with Cursor back in the day, but switched to Claude Code and then Codex when Cursor got too expensive.
If price wasn't an issue, maybe I'd prefer Cursor only because I can easily switch between models. But that's it. I always disliked the "accept/reject" workflow in cursor, but that's probably optional nowadays I guess?
I love the accept reject flow because I still constantly have to stop AI models from writing awful architecture or reimplementing code we already wrote elsewhere
Yeah, I have found the same. A lot of times it does get things right, but if it deviates man it can just drift hard.
For example, sometimes Claude just obsessively reads files and goes on massive tangents. Then when I stop it and ask, "why are you doing that?", it kindly apologizes and admits it shouldn't have gone on a tangent.
The token burn if I don't stop it would be quite high.
Granted, this might be because I'm not giving it optimal prompt/negative-prompt instructions though.
How is it different from Keep / Discard in other tools? I've been slowly converting my git repositories to jj locally because that gives me more granular fallback and mix and match options.
Well I tried CLaude Code for the first time in a while (I am building my own coding app www.propelcode.app so I can code on my phone when I take my kids to classes and such) and it literally ignored my question and suggestion and just kept coding away.
I hate the accept reject flow, because I want a conventional code review workflow where I can write comments on specific lines of code and maybe edit the code myself.
If I reject, then the AI will struggle to modify just the parts I disagree with, if I accept, the AI will tend towards adding code rather than updating the bad code.
At that point copy paste without agentic coding tends to work much better.
Fable makes any IDE AI integration almost entirely unnecessary. Claude one shots pretty much everything, and fixing any small errors is easier when just talking to Claude again.
Anthropic is going to offer better pricing using their agentic harness. Why pay more for less?
An IDE at this point is best as a tool for code review. They need to start building better code review tools.
I can't quite understand the "fixing small errors is easier when just talking to Claude" flow.
I tried having it write some tests today. It got very close to what I want, but picked a stupid set of input values (two fields that look independent that should only be used with related values). I thought about "how do I explain this" and then just went in and fixed it myself.
How is it easier to write "Okay, go back to testBlah and change xxx to yyy" versus clicking on XXX in the IDE and typing YYY by hand? Maybe if you had 500 faulty tests and were forbidden from using search-and-replace for some reason.
It makes sense when code generation is the limiting factor, but I end up with a lot of changes where the actual code delta is smaller than the necessary prompt to convince the bot to produce it.
Try the superpowers plugin, let it write a spec (what do you want?) and a plan (how is it implemented). Then let it implement the plan.
Review each step as much as you care. These things take time so you can just do other stuff while it’s cooking.
With proper isolation of projects you can easily have multiple sessions in parallel. I frequently have 4 to 8 parallel Claude Code sessions, each with whole trees of agents reproducing, speccing, planning, implementing and reviewing things.
For common mistakes, you can make it remember things or rely on reviews.
the reason to use cursor nowadays isn't the IDE (though it's helpful perhaps once a week), but how it makes running models from multiple providers trivial out of the box. I don't have to juggle keys or drop to a shell tool call, it supports calling out to e.g. gemini in a subagent natively. I have multiple models cross-reviewing plans and diffs as a matter of course.
claude code was seriously annoying with the flickering, maybe it's fixed now, I don't know.
cursor also has a (bad) cli if you need it, it seems it's mostly used to setup remote agents, but it does the job in a pinch.
OpenCode is miserable from a security perspective. Well clarification the plans they offer where they bundled in free models that train on your use. You are then left to use an OpenRouter which I find pretty flaky for at least the leading Chinese models.
I doubt most people use OpenCode coding plans, nor do they use OpenRouter. I use subscription plans from ChatGPT, z.ai, MiniMax & Xiaomi with OpenCode. It handles authentication with all of them seamlessly. I switch between models based on task/subtask and based on usage limits. You can get the most value out of a lot of these plans at their second-tier and they are often switching in value relative to each other, so it makes sense to arbitrage them like this.
Most of that switching is automated (oh-my-openagent - defaults sub-tasks to different roles, so for example I use MiniMax for explorer tasks and GPT 5.5 for deep design & review tasks, and GLM 5.2 for general orchestrator & most coding). If I hit usage limits it switches to a backup for that task. I'm not sure Cursor authenticates with all the subscription coding plans from all those companies - but if it does it can't be doing it any better.
“Well clarification the plans they offer where they bundled in free models that train on your use.”
Just what I said. They offer paid plans through their tool. Said paid plans are kind of a dark pattern where it’s not immediately obvious the models are training on your data. The harness is fine but that kind of business turns me off and I am usually pretty neutral about those sorts of things.
I still saw a lot of flickering in VS Code (I simply use CC as a terminal in VS Code, without the plugin) as of 2 weeks ago. I think it's a combination of CC bugs + Electron(?) rendering the VS Code uses for terminal.
Moved on to Zed (native Rust rendering) 2 weeks ago -> nothing flickers.
Sadly, with Fable 5 cutoff, I am actively exploring CC alternatives. Pi/OMP.sh works great as an agent (definitely better than CC). GPT is seemingly not as good as Opus, but with better agent and better skills, it probaly won't matter anyway. GPT lets you use any agent on Pro subscription.
Maybe flickering, but it's still broken in various ways. Only a few days ago I had an issue where the text I was typing was outside of the textbox frame. Resizing the terminal still maintained the broken view.
On the flipside, I enjoy Cursor now and came back to it after leaving it over a year ago. The 2.5 model is fast as hell and very good. And whatever harness they have it's terrific, great results. I also really enjoy the fact that I can open my website in the Cursor in-app browser and just click and reference stuff. It's a really cracked workflow. The models can only get better for them.
I would also add that Cursor's "Debug" harness is incredible. Hit "Tab" in the AI editor to Tab through the options (Plan, Multitask, Ask, etc.)
If you do any kind of on-device work, it will spin up a local HTTP log server, and pipe logs from your real device (phone, hardware, etc.) to the server and do realtime debugging.
Claude will mostly guess, have you copy + paste logs, etc.
> I can open my website in the Cursor in-app browser and just click and reference stuff.
I’ve never used cursor and have only seen it in a couple work lunch and learn demos. I’ve never seen that feature. I have a lot of use cases where I’m asking cc to move a widget down a little bit or make a data table full width etc. Being able to reference the actual UI would be useful.
Also C++ engineer, but from my perspective, for large tasks, agentic coding is still lacking no matter how well I describe desired output. So in that cases I fall back to manual coding and cursor tab helps a lot with boring parts
I actually don't let AI take on large tasks beyond test writing and refactoring helper scripts/utils. I keep it on a very short leash for driver/middleware code since the quality bar needs to be extremely high for our codebase. Up until recently I didn't even trust it for that, but some experiments show it's fairly good and even detected issues outside of the refactored functions which I did let it touch. This is with a good amount of 'thought engineering' though where I try to think hard about how to emphasize certain factors and define the problem as best I can.
I've used AI but not through Cursor to implement a high-performance serialization library using expression templates. Non-trivial and few kLoC targeting a soft-realtime and critical system. Would you consider that a large task?
It is possible to use Cursor via ACP, so you can use it in any editor that supports ACP (notably the JetBrains IDEs). Our company went all in with Cursor and at the same time centrally disabled the AI functionality of JetBrains IDEs, but a pretty large group of developers (me included) were so vocal about wanting to continue to use our "old" IDEs that IT eventually relented and enabled the plugins needed to support Cursor.
You know you can open the same project in cursor so agent does its own stuff and then opens JetBrains IDE to do your code navigation etc. ?
I am pissed off by people calling Cursor an IDE … Cursor is text editor with AI agents bolted on. I still like what agents do and how the context is managed in Cursor but it is far far away from proper IDE.
Dunno, Cursor's agents are now more-less equal to Claude Code, just the workflow is slightly different. I like the IDE integration for some projects, allowing me to quickly inspect/review/change/search code, while running Claude Code/Codex/OpenCode/Pi/Hermes on different projects often with local models and it's mostly a question about your personal development style instead of inherent tool capabilities.
Right now I think there is an edge to how you construct prompts and config files. There is a large difference between "modify f() to do..." and "modify f() to do... Review the current variables and make sure they are still used consistent with their naming. Look for unreachable and dead code. Examine callers and called functions for side effects from the introduced changes...".
I don't think that will make much difference in a year.
I'm increasingly convinced of the opposite. IMO Fable was pretty similarly capable for my day to day work as Opus.
I think there's a pretty good chance that we've reached the point of diminishing returns, for our specific use case.
There are still like a billion other (more difficult) use cases to be tackled, but I think "generating code" has gotten really good to the point where the other bottlenecks will prevent further exponential progress on this specific task.
It's already going away for me in a sense as I build up a library of AGENTS.md and Codex skills. I see no reason such things won't get baked in at the agent layer so that domain specific rules and such are automatically applied when appopriate.
I'm not sure if you're ahead of me or behind me on this curve, but fwiw, my experience has been that we have now encoded everything that is useful in the various markdown files and have reached the point of diminishing returns on this, with more powerful new models making noticeable but not revolutionary improvements as they come out.
You're essentially making the case here that your work is now automated into a set of one-shot actions that can be performed by an AI model and your job has become to selectively apply these actions. That says either a) we don't do the same work, and instead you're doing some kind of low level devops function that I've only ever seen in rare cases where a human isn't needed anymore, or b) you've vastly oversimplified the software engineering you're doing.
Sophisticated chain of reasoning LLMs like ChatGPT have baked in some natural language operations and they make it so i can create at a higher level of the language expression stack. But I'm still formulating my own expression. There's no conceivable path I can see where an improved model is going to be able to do what I do. I think that is clear from my ChatGPT threads at least.
I think you're reading quite a bit into my comment.. I'll try to respond to a more accurate response to my comment but I'm not going to waste time with this sort of response.
Yeah, uh, why would it go away? In what world do you completely surrender your ability to control the work product, the methods for achieving said work product, etc. That is the dream of a PHB.
Not OP, but I generally agree. Models are powerful enough now to reliably instruct other models. They don’t need fancy tools or IDEs, just the command line.
With deterministic workflows, type-safe languages and test suites, agentic loops pretty much “can’t fail”. They will continue until the types resolve, the tests pass, and the project requirements are deterministically met.
By that point it’s literally just a case of typing a prompt in to a text field, and waiting.
It works great in dynamic languages as well. Static typing is mostly to aid the IDE. In dynamic languages you can infer the type by looking at the code, and LLM are good at that.
Same path as you. Went from $60 cursor plan (often exceeding it which costed more in API) to a limitless $100 codex plan where I basically say "read the markdown and implement the instructions". Deepseek also works quite well, surprisingly!
(FWIW Im mostly using python for OCR, LLM calls, data analysis..)
I think I'm late to the party with cursor but I don't use it as an editor at all, I keep VS Code open on another screen for that. All I do in there is agent sessions. I would be open to something else but all the comparisons I see are out of date and talk about the IDE a lot.
The comparison is with Claude Code and codex (and open harnesses like opencode and Pi). IMO they are both better, if you aren't interested in the IDE functionality.
The code suggestions. It's highly distracting and pulls me out of my flow. I know how to code and I don't mind typing. I don't need AI making trivial suggestions. I want it to do exactly what I tell it to do.
I like cursor, but I'm assuming they're talking about how it hijacks your tab key. It's amazing when it works, and infuriating when I just want to insert a damn tab!
Composer is fairly decent. Many people aren’t in the market for an IDE — and a subpar one at that —, but they could sell API access to Composer itself.
I think Fable gave a bit of a sneak peek into the future.
My objective KPI: for the few days I was using Fable (18hr a day), it would frequently push back against my design ideas and propose alternatives -- and they almost always felt better to me. Back to Opus now, still 18hr days - and I dont think it disagreed with me meaningfully even once since Saturdy. I consider myself and old hand -- and i think Fable really didn't need me to be very specific in my prompts, it would have done a good job regardless, or even despite my prompting.
Of course whether this is the future is anyone's guess. Maybe we will experience a butlerian jihad and there won't be any prompting whatsoever for completely different reasons :-)
The models are getting better at agentic coding, so over time using complicated harnesses and precise prompt engineering to attempt to squeeze out an extra X% performance will become irrelevant as the models approach expert-level performance. The bitter lesson in miniature.
>> Fwiw I am a c/c++ systems engineer. I think anyone mentioning anecdotal experience like this should clarify. Maybe frontend JavaScript folks have a totally different take and that's expected.
Similar experience, having transitioned from full-stack to a dedicated C/C++ stack, learned/experienced firsthand that there is no one-size-fits-all tool.
multiple organizations I contract with have killed their cursor enterprise plans over the past several weeks
to me, this seems like the perfect time for Cursor to exit and even "Q3 completion" is too late. Deal just needs to close. Fortunately Q3 completion could mean July 1st too
I taught myself assembly language from a book on a 286, I cracked games with SoftICE as a teenager, tried out every Linux distribution in the 90s, and have been developing software professionally for 2 decades. I prefer Cursor.
Am I an outlier or do you just judge people for weird reasons? I’ve never seen an IDE person judge a terminal person, it’s always the other way around - what’s up with that?
I think it's more of a sign of a good engineer. I know a number of engineers that are good and don't really work with the terminal. On the other hand, every engineer I've worked with who was a 'terminal guy' was great. I think being good with the terminal is a signal that the person is willing to 'dig in' and understand stuff at a lower level.
> I think being good with the terminal is a signal that the person is willing to 'dig in' and understand stuff at a lower level.
You know what else is a good sign of them willing to dig in and understand stuff at a lower level ? If they dig in and understan stuff at a lower level. Let's judge people on what matters - the actual work and value they bring. Not status symbols like their IDE of choice or how fast they type into the keyboard.
Yes, that's why I said 'signal' and not 'sole metric used to determine worth'. Devs get so touchy about this subject. I didn't say being good with the terminal is all that matters, it's just an extra piece of information.
I’m very comfortable with the terminal, but let’s be honest. It’s not very good at certain apps. For example, copy/pasting long bits of code or strings into and out of Claude code is highly annoying. Line breaks in weird spots, because of the terminal, for example.
Anyways, I use cursor for a number of reasons:
1. I still want very quick access to the code in the editor. So I want the IDE.
2. Generally solid defaults. Auto-compaction, plan mode, etc, all work pretty well.
3. When I switched back to it from Claude code, it was genuinely faster at running Opus than Claude code. Claude code was grinding to a fucking halt every two minutes.
4. So annoying to search and view your chat history in Claude code. I’m a visual person. I also want all my repos loaded into a big workspace. Cursor also does that great out of the box.
5. I don’t have time to redo my terminal setup again to optimize it for Claude.
Tbh, I’m not aware of much that Claude code does that you can’t also do in cursor. At the end of the day, the agent loop and tools are not that different, and the model is identical.
The tool you use to prompt it is not the hard part. I just work faster when I have everything easily accessible in one spot, which was easier for me to accomplish with cursor than Claude. I found it just got out of my way.
Someone instructing AI through the terminal is a bit like an office worker with a tool belt. I don't think you can say anything about their coding ability until they are coding without AI. Even if thats in notepad.
I actually never mentioned anything about actually using the AI tools integrated into Cursor in my post.
I think I'd generalize my post more to say the more often somebody reaches for the terminal, in my anecdotal experience the more proficient they tend to be.
Totally disagree. I find people still using cursor or other IDE centric flows want to review the code and be more interactive. Claude Code and Codex push agent autonomy and speed. Sorry but they go off the rails too much.
This. I hate VSCode as an IDE and is the reason why I have not used Cursor. I wish Jetbrains actually had some brains to build a better coding agent inside their IDEs (which I think are one of the best out there), but for now Im stuck with codex/cc + Jetbrains IDE
IDE ships it's own compiler, debugger, usually some sort of container/container orchestrator and database tool. I.e. the things that separate hobby projects from production ones. VSCode has these things but they're extensions, not build into the editor
I am not trying to be pedantic, I am really just curious because I’ve never heard someone saying something like vscode isn’t an IDE. I am mostly curious because those of us that write languages like Ruby or python with no compiler that typically debug in the terminal or repl feel like we have an IDE and refer to it as such.
I also think your characterization about hobby/production fall short. My fastAPI and rails codebases anre definitely not a hobby.
Thanks for clarifying though. Interesting to hear your perspective.
> I also think your characterization about hobby/production fall short. My fastAPI and rails codebases anre definitely not a hobby.
That's not what I said?
What I said the was the line between hobby/production is use of the tools themselves. Doesn't matter if you use them via a terminal, VSCode extension, or an external app.
Line between editor/IDE is the former requires downloading extensions but the latter bundles them in the final application.
You're right, the meaning has become pedantic so I'd put forward a new term because the line between editor and IDE is blurred... but there's still a vast difference between editing on vscode vs IDEA or Goland.
ILE? Integrated Language Environment. The former caters to a specific language ecosystem. Text editors are polyglots by contrast.
If you call text editor that has terminal bolted on that’s not IDE. It is exactly the same as if you would open terminal on the side. Grepping/search with regex is also far from code navigation that is available in an IDE.
Debugging tools and code navigation in a proper IDE like Visual Studio or JetBrains Rider is totally different development experience than editor with terminal.
why do annoying engineers have such a weird fetish/superiority complex about the terminal. Its an inherently inferior UI. Theres absolutely nothing you can do in a terminal that you cant do in a GUI, and every TUI is just jumping through insane hoops to support functionality thats trivial in a GUI.
Why on earth would you want to look at a code diff in a terminal? Why on earth would you want to use weird bespoke keyboard shortcuts to navigate sub-agents in a TUI session. Why on earth would i not want the ability to open/edit a file manually in the tool im using to write code.
As someone who has spent the last 10+ years working in Tmux - but is entirely comfortable on Mac, Windows and Linux desktop environments - here are the key reasons why the terminal experience is superior for me.
- I work a lot with data - and streaming data through text tools is twitch fast. If someone has a question about data - before anybody else can log in to their superset, or analytics database, and try and work through the SQL queries or charts to get the answer - I've already jammed the data through awk and got an answer.
- As an SRE - I work with a lot of systems that have pretty rich APIs - so being able to send a request, get the answer back in json, dump it into jq, select the parts I care about - maybe -c to compress it and ripgrep a subset out - is just fast.
- I work in a lot of contexts with a lot of different systems, datacenters, applications - tmux lets me keep all of them cleanly organized in a separate windows and subpanes. I'll have 15-20 windows open per week, and maybe a 5-6 panes in each- keeping 100+ different contexts (and scroll backs, bash history) - all nicely organized is really useful.
- I'm also a systems guy - and there is no other way to dig into a system but the terminal - netstat, ps, dmesg, /proc - these are all components that have only one credible path to investigation and discovery. If you aren't super comfortable in the terminal - zero way to learn about this stuff.
- Working remotely - means ssh. So - once again - terminal.
The Focus on the terminal is that it's the best tool (and in some cases the only tool) for so many of these tasks - and by performing these tasks a lot - you learn about systems - so the people who spend a lot of time in the terminal tend to know a lot more about systems than people who don't.
It's a terminal emulator with a command prompt that also gives you access to LLMs. But the interesting bit for people who work on a lot of machines is that this also works when you ssh to any remote machine.
So you can bring your agents to any remote system, it even works somewhat well for network devices.
The thing you can do in the terminal that you can't do in a GUI, is glue together over 50 years of useful tools, no matter where you got them from or if the authors have ever heard of each other.
If your workflow fits entirely within a single app's GUI, then yeah, the terminal version of that app is not going to be as useful. But if that app doesn't exist yet, you can put together an 80% version of it for 20% of the work.
Historically, it's also a lot more resistant to rot. Brian Kernighan isn't going to start charging a subscription fee for AWK - and if he did, there are many forks and similar tools.
And, addressing a specific point - why would I want to view a code diff in a terminal? Sure, 'diff old.txt new.txt' is probably less useful than popping it open in a nice GUI with highlighting. But "diff old.txt new.txt | grep '^+'" will only show me added lines, or "| less" and type "/foobar" to jump to all mentions of foobar.
And this is like, the least you can do - the stuff you learn in the second class of "Using the Terminal 101". You can easily use this with git, as a building block to make a quick script to graph the number of changes over time in your repo. Yes, there's probably a GUI somewhere in your workflow that can show this (maybe you click around in Github to find it). But, maybe you also want to just filter that to changes in a specific module in the codebase, or an author, or quantify what module changed the most each month. If you've learnt the building blocks, the scriptability of the terminal lets you put that together quickly.
Anything you do in the terminal can trivially be scripted (automated). It's a self reinforcing loop of making life easier. After many years of working in the terminal, and making little scripts, my workflow is extremely fast, comfortable, and customized to me. You can do some of this via GUI tools, but terminal makes customization easy. Also, using keyboard shortcuts is just vastly superior to using the mouse, you can't convince me otherwise.
> Why on earth would i not want the ability to open/edit a file manually in the tool im using to write code.
I don't know what you mean by this. You can open any file in neovim at any time without leaving the program.
Being familiar with the terminal also makes building CI for the team trivial because I'm already familiar with how all the commands work in the CLI. I'm basically the goto 'devops' guy because I'm one of the few people who actually knows how to work in a Unix terminal.
I will say, TUI is not the same as CLI. I don't find a meaningful difference between a TUI and a GUI other than being able to use tmux or something for window management. I prefer gui tools for database management, querying, git diffs, email, all kinds of stuff.
As for the superiority complex. I've got no judgement on people who prefer the GUI. I have many excellent coworkers who primarily use GUI tools. Having said that, every engineer I've met that works primarily in the terminal has been great. It's a very strong signal of technical competence in my opinion, but terminal familiarity being a signal of competence, in no way makes GUI usage a signal of incompetence.
Absolutely nothing? That's certainly not true. My experience is that those who grew up learning the command line are so familiar with it that they excel at navigating those bespoke keystrokes more quickly than any GUI user who has to scroll, point, and click. Add to that features like command history and autocomplete, and shell users are often far more productive than GUI users.
Like any other computer UI: Terminal-based programs (whether ultimately windowed in a GUI or not) didn't start off being familiar. But for those who use them, they eventually become familiar.
And that familiarity transfers between different systems. Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever: The flow of any particular terminal-based program is the same everywhere that it can be used.
It's tidy, and light. It's also network-transparent, and things like ssh keep it secure. Multi-user support is the norm instead of the exception on systems where terminals are common. It doesn't interrupt anyone else's work like something like using Anydesk to access some GUI desktop somewhere else can.
The keyboard shortcuts are annoying at first, but they're faster than mousing around in a GUI -- and once learned, they're approximately impossible to forget.
(You're free to hate terminals if you wish. I don't care if you justify it; I'm not your boss.)
I did a lot of automation at my last job, which was closer to engineering in the classical sense than engineering in the software sense. The automation mostly amounted to web scraping and interacting with local systems, with a generous amount of logic in between. The largest roadblock wasn't the scraping or the logic, it was the inbuilt assumption of the local programs that there would be an ape with a mouse and keyboard driving the interaction. Outputs that could have been text needed to be copied to and read from the clipboard, or exported as a spreadsheet. Inputs that could have been text were only accepted in spreadsheet form. Pixels needed to be read from the screen to tell when one step was complete and the next could begin. Mouse clicks and keystrokes sent to and fro when it all could have been a series of commands. I cannot count how many written processes and procedures existed could have been a bash simple bash script.
I'm not arguing that these programs should not have a GUI, for that was the simplest way to use them, but the lack of command line functionality places a hard limit on the productivity of an organization, and ensures that the only progress on that front comes at the expensive of exceedingly limited developer time.
"But nobody knows how to use a terminal anymore," I hear you say. Well of course they don't, nobody under 35 without a background in programming has ever had cause to use one. We made everything so simple that nobody ever has to learn anything. That isn't to say that people cannot learn, just they have been robbed of the natural opportunity to do so. Otherwise intelligent people never progress beyond the manual step-by-step interaction that passes for "using a computer" today.
A computer is a tool in much the same way that the a machine shop is a tool: it is a tool that can build other tools. The role of software developers should not just be to build simple tools that can do one task in isolation, it should be to build tools that less technical people can use to build the tools they find themselves in need of. GUI-only programs are simply not fit for that purpose because they lack composability of simpler terminal-based programs.
Yah this judgment and arrogance is so annoying in tech. And worse it stops us from learning. Some of the best lessons of my career were when a new developer asked a question often taken for granted or we implemented a design pattern to make coding more approachable.
Terminal/CLI is superior if you know what you want to accomplish. There is no faster way of doing stuff on a computer if you know what you’re doing and having tab completion and knowing all the incantations.
GUI is superior when you have to figure out what to do and what needs to be done. GIT branches state checking, finding out a switch to enable a feature so much easier in graphical interfaces.
I find that what you call „annoying engineers” are just people who have their tools and use them efficiently … but once they have to step out of their path they become annoying or even obnoxious.
The opposite is random person who expects everything to be easy and available in less than 3 clicks — well good luck engineering an interface for complex system that does that, not everything is Facebook, there are systems where you need to spend time wrapping your head around.
Honestly the TUI in most of these coding agents is so fancy I have trouble thinking of them as "terminal". I use Pi Coding Agent and the fact that it's terminal means it's easy to run inside something properly sandboxed in a YOLO mode using normal bash commands instead of relying on individually sandboxed tools.
Once I got the tmux settings for proper scrolling and whatnot it feels fine. Honestly the TUI of tmux is the one that really enrages me - so much complexity for just "I want to switch terminals on my remote".
With the one caveat that it does not (yet) support copy/paste buffers or copying from the scroll back buffer. It’s also adamant that you use a mouse to select/copy - anything more complex and you need to pipe everything into neovim (or whatever text editor you use) and do your work there. I love zellij - it feels like the future - but hard to give up keyboard based select/copy and pulling from my scrollback.
why do annoying engineers has such a weird fetish/superiority complex about the terminal. Its an inherently inferior UI. Theres absolutely nothing you can do in a terminal that you cant do in a GUI, and every TUI is just jumping through insane hoops to support functionality thats trivial in a GUI. And guess what, you can just open a terminal in cursor! who knew!?
Why on earth would you want to look at a code diff in a terminal? Why on earth would you want to use weird bespoke keyboard shortcuts to navigate sub-agents in a TUI session.
Why should others spend their valuable time helping you? Especially when you insult the people you want to answer you "fetish/superiority complex" just demonstrates your own prejudice.
Personally I ask AI for a summary of positions, and prompt to provide some good articles on a subject - ideally articles from supporters of either side.
I actually was a Cursor advocate / CC hater (go back in my comment history), and now I use only TUI coding harnesses.
To start a big part is just the efficacy of them, which comes down to the model and the harness logic itself. CC is good, it's sub-agents, loops, background jobs / agents, skills/hooks/etc have typically been pretty far ahead though others are constantly catching up.
But you're sort of missing something. I use iTerm, so to me it's not the TUI itself, it's iTerm. And while it's imperfect, what I get is this:
I can open and close sessions nearly instantly and tile and window and tab them as flexibly as I want, plus it's a system I'm familiar with in terms of shortcuts etc. Has my configured theme, fonts, etc all set up. Every GUI app is different, every TUI app has half of the UI already incredibly familiar to me, it's not "just text", it's iTerm.
That also means they all are the same - I run Codex and Claude and pi side by side, and i switch between them with no overhead and minimal mental model shift. Sure, different harness does suck but that's the same issue with GUI just with an additional new layer to learn.
Smaller thing is because it's all text, there's no limits on my ability to copy things out. And it's a really fast text renderer that can render tens of thousands of rows efficiently. Many GUIs have various dialogs, unselectable areas, virtualization, or just slow past a point. I trust my terminal scales.
I don’t think mapping tooling to ability makes sense here, particularly when the “advanced” tools here just abstract more away, though I agree that Cursor is terrible. So many useless windows.
Opposite. The weakest engineers trust CC or codex, stopped reviewing the code and push slop PRs. Those still acting in the loop move faster with better architecture and coding patterns and aren't losing their skills.
>That said, I think we're in a narrow window of time right now where any of this matters. Prompt "engineering" and working around your tools will be over in a year or so.
As previously C system programmer, I barely use IDE, cli agent for coding and desktop codex for various non coding tasks.
Nowadays settled to codex/gpt5.5 and it does really good job
I didn't like cursor when it first came about but now I use it for my personal projects. The plan is good value for accessing different sota models occasionally for planning. Composer is actually really good, and fast.
I'm not sure if it's because my personal projects are small enough I know them inside out and my work project is huge, but I prefer terminal code agents for day work over ide integration.
i moved all my AI coding over to claude code when claude 4 came out, but kept cursor for the tab complete. since opus 4.5 i haven't really needed the tab complete so i canceled my cursor sub 6 months ago.
switched back to vscode so i'm not exposed to the potential mess that is openvsx too. trying to get used to zed but i'm just so used to vscode
Also using codex as a full time partner these days. What do you think happens in a year or so that changes the way it works around the tools? It becomes the only tool we interact with, and it assumes control over the others?
Could you clarify what you mean by “…will be over in a year or so”. Genuine question. Is it that models will be so good that none of this matters or we will need to go back to older ways?
I recently made an npm package with a small C helper that runs in the background. The JS/TS code is 99.9% unit test covered and for sure "cleaner" code. Just my opinion though.
Literally the opposite is true. Being a text editor at its core, and by spending a lot of effort refining the human-AI pair programming experience, Cursor makes sense for someone who wants to lead code development with AI being a speed multiplier and a team member.
I primarily use Cursor, compared against Claude and haven't used Codex before - to me the benefits:
- Composer 2.5 is cheap, fast, and very effective; I don't even use other models that much anymore, as it's usually marginally better for way more cost, though sometimes I do for specific things like making better translations for our app than a coding-specific model could normally output
- It makes setting up and maintaining Cloud Agents super easy, the agent can basically set up itself and if anything changes that makes it not update properly, then it tells you and can fix itself easily
- Easy to move agents from remotely in the cloud to local and vice versa
- Easy to work with agents via either comments on GitHub, or via the web app on my phone (though it is relatively constrained relative to the actual desktop UI, which is a bummer)
- Code reviews with Bugbot is surprisingly good now vs when it first came out, as is the Security Agent, while being an order of magnitude cheaper than stuff like Claude reviews
- Automations are easy to configure and manage - crons, in response to repo events, etc. For example I don't use Renovate or Dependabot much anymore since LLMs can update deps and investigate subtle breaking changes much better than a dumb version bump script can
- Limits are obvious rather than Anthropic's mysterious quota amount that they don't explain at all
- Queueing up messages rather than the agent taking in new messages mid-work and then trying to mesh them together somehow - I find queueing much more predictable and easier to work with
- Plan mode is good too, but not particularly different than any other agent
- Easy to jump into the Editor view and actually go in and manually code things or interactively code with the LLM when you need to, since sometimes LLMs just suck at doing certain things autonomously. I'm not in the "stop coding bro" camp, I still like to take the wheel fairly often.
The arbitrary and non-deterministic nature of LLM workflows gives me full on ick. As an old embedded/systems guy I have always prioritized determinism and repeatability in my workflows.
But damn, agents are amazing and I'm enjoying being a "thought process designer". I'm not going back. Even if AI development stops today my career will never be the same.
I felt the same way about the non-determinism but realized it can be really beneficial to have a machine that can fairly reliably turn non-determinism into determinism.
I’m working on a tiny agent harness at home to learn and the process of taking human speech and turning it into agent tool calls that output something generally deterministic depending on how the tool is defined is so interesting.
One of the big takeaways is you really only have to rely on the non-determinism<->determinism translation layer once when you switch between the two domains. You can obviously rely on it more if you want, and that’s probably faster because determinism is hard, but you don’t need too do that.
That sounds very cool. It’s sometimes baffling that LLMs can’t use tools reliably. Serena and Semble both require some arcane instructions to coerce Claude Code into compliance. Just stop trying to pipe nonsense commands into each other, man!
I think it makes sense when you dig into why that non-determinism conversion is so hard.
For voice related things you have a lot of turn of phrase scenarios that can make no sense unless you know. Phrasing like “Put Larry on the horn.” For someone familiar with old lingo for phone calls makes sense. For someone else they might think of a war horn, someone else a music class.
All of those are wildly different situations. It’s not hard to see how one oops between two non deterministic things can quickly go off the rails.
The fact we can get away with so much non-determinism->non-determinism recursion is frankly amazing when you realize how easy it is to imprecisely describe what it is you’re thinking.
Would just make the answer to the same exact prompt X repeatedly the same.
It wouldn't change the fact that prompt X', functionaly indistinguisable from X, aside from small phrasing changes, can give a totally different looking answer.
when i make a statement describing the world it will be a totally opposite answer to the prompt "synthesize and analyze the steelman that X" because you are asking it to create something new and then you are giving it room to counter signal and some space to escape into but often it doesnt even countersignal much or at all in this analysis phase
A lot of us are too busy solving problems. Learning about the latest language features, which we often won't be able to use anyway due to the trouble of moving a large dev environment to a newer standard, feels like academic masturbation.
C++ folks are very much into their language, and can't seem to understand that most folks don't want to dedicate significant amounts of mental resources purely to language details.
Moving to new C++ is a non event, change the compiler / flags and done. Using the new features requires some learning but not a big deal since you can figure out what you need from a summary and learn what is useful for your problem.
The problems of the code I'm writing far exceeds the complexity of the language. Your complaint about complexity fall flat to me, unless you are working on a trivial program you need to deal with things far more complex than any language.
GCC was implemented in C and there are plenty of other C compilers written in C. GCC has been converted to C++ at some point, but large parts are still essentially C and I do not think the change to C++ was actually helpful (but others may disagree). In any case, the idea that one needs C++ to have C compilers is certainly simply wrong.
Clang/LLVM with its more permissive licence sees _much_ wider use and is written purely in C++. PlayStation, automotive, platforms and runtimes like Chromium/V8, Android, etc. are all built with Clang.
With Android, iDevices, PlayStation, Switch, and everyone that had proprietary compilers down using downstream forks from clang, due to the more appealing license.
Who is left still using GCC, other than existing projects lacking a clang backend for a snowflake embed CPU?
In any case, if it is a modern GCC release past 2012, it was compiled with C++ as well.
Naturally GCC was originally written in C, given its age, and the original GNU coding standards document.
With time, the GCC developers acknowledged the benefits of using C++ over C, and migrated the code.
GCC requires a C++ compiler to bootstrap since around 2012, and GNU coding standards has been updated to several languages beyond C, time to go up with times.
The question is whether GCC is a good example of the benefits of C++ for compilers. Considering the code looks to 95% like C code and uses data structures that we originally implemented in C, I don't see this argument.
I told him the same thing multiple times, just open a random code location in GCC, or a recently committed change, and see that it's basically C. But he keeps repeating that ridiculous argument like a broken record.
I'd rather have two dishwashers and an automated loading/dispensing system built into each one. The dishwasher is already a fairly optimal dish storage device. Using somewhat standardized dish dimensions would make it fairly easy to implement.
I wish my kitchen was that big, but even then I think I'd prefer to have my plates stacked. Sure the ones my family uses every meal may as well live in the dishwasher, but I have a few more because once in a while I have guests (or they break) and I don't want those to have the empty space between them the dishwasher needed.
A couple weeks ago I saw a proud post by a humanoid robot CEO showing off how well his robots could sort objects on an assembly line. It was painful to watch. It's like he's never seen a real industrial sorting system in his life. Vision algos from 30 years ago along with simple mechanics or puffs of air were doing it 100x faster back then. I'm not convinced there is a bubble in AI, but there's definitely one in humanoid robots.
Yeah but the idea is that you can have a generalist robot that can do many different assembly line tasks.
There are plenty of manufacturing tasks that are still done by humans because it's too much hassle to make a dedicated robot to do it. Even on high volume car manufacturing it's very common to have human steps.
Sorting is just where they've got to so far; not the final destination.
Yeah I've got all the fun eye issues of aging and also a decent case of HPPD which adds a lot of snow to my vision. It seemed to get worse after a spate of ocular migraines a few years ago. It almost feels like my optic nerves were a little fried from the migraines.
I'm trying progressive lenses again after throwing them in the trash a few years ago. The distortion is the worst part for me. Moving my head around makes the world warped as it moves between zones. Maybe I'd get used to it if I forced myself to wear them all the time but I spend most of my day WFH and wearing a weak version of my distance prescription that lets me focus on my monitor yet see reasonably well around the house without too much eyestrain.
But it doesn't work that way. I've had them for months now and I still notice them. While walking, while looking around. While driving.
Is it much better? Yes.
Stop noticing? Heck no.
I'm still giving it some time but I really don't like the sudden weird feeling I still get from time to time. And I can't even figure out why it's fine much of the time and then suddenly I get that weird feeling again.
And just having to double chin it to see the ground in front of you is so annoying.
I've had mine about 9 months and I definitely still notice the distortion. I'm glad to see my opinion validated here. My doctor talked the progressives up, and maybe a lot of people do like them, but I'm definitely ready to try the traditional split lens.
I'll add religion to the mix. We're less religious now. Even folks who are religious now(at least in the Christian West) seem to practice a different religion than we did 50 years ago. Religion does many things, good and bad, but it definitely prizes children and reproduction. If it didn't, it would quickly get replaced by a mode of thought/belief which did. I'm not advocating for religion here, just stating that it likely plays a large role in reproduction.
Yes, I don't think this is a single faceted issue. I've yet to see anyone here mention animals yet... but numerous animals in captivity have also been shown to have far lower breeding/fertility rates. Factors like restricted space, lack of mate choice, and disrupted natural instincts can all influence animal behavior, and I see no reason why the same can't apply to us?
I know for me personally, it's not economic reasons as to why I have not had children, but more a problem of finding the right mate at the right time. Some people just aren't socially fit for each other...
I think the real interesting question isn't "why don't people have children" but more "why do those who have one or two kids not have more?" It seems everyone around came from a family of 6+ or knew those who did, yet everyone has 1 or 2 kids, three if the first two were both the same sex.
I didn't choose to have kids, but I have a friend who prioritized doing so, and she talked about hoping to have a larger family. She got married and had her first child not long after graduating from college. So biologically a very healthy age.
She ended up with two. Pregnancy sounds nice and well until your teeth start falling out. Some women just have a really rough time of it - so doing it while also being the primary caregiver for 1 or more other young child... yeah, even if you're financially stable and supported from your spouse's job, that is really a hard thing to manage.
In her case, it seems extra hard because neither her parents nor her husband's have helped with caring for the kids.
Meanwhile, my step-sister (who is less financially well-off than my friend) has 3, but they are constantly hanging out at my parents place or with extended family. Having nearby family that wants to help makes such a huge difference.
The familial support really is key - it is possible to have a large family "on your own" but it's significantly harder than if you have cooperative family in the area, or are already in multi-generational living situations.
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