For the first example, in a recent architecture task, I took ~6 hours researching options, and would have taken ~2-3 hours implementing my version. It took ~20 minutes with Cursor given I was able to give it my desired implementation very clearly and it applies the code immediately. I take most of those 20 mins reviewing the code, not even writing!
For the second, I mean stuff like renaming many variables that have similar but not identical names, or rewriting the way functions are defined/documented so it's the same for all, or adding type hints to all functions. Stuff that you need to typically do 1 by 1 and can't do Ctrl+Shift+F or multiline edit for. With Cursor, I make the first change and it simply knows I want to do something similar for the rest of my file/workspace. I just press tab 10 times and all the changes are done. From ~30-40 minutos to ~1 minute on a task that happens often.
Both of those have made much more productive (easily worth the price). As a distant third, having the ability to have Claude + Search has also been pretty useful.
I do think that there is a danger to the tool. It is great for senior programmers, but I think a quite harmful poison for juniors. While I go from large amounts of research to a bit of code reviewing, I think a junior will likely go from 0 research to direct implementation to 20 hours of bug squashing because they trusted it blindly.