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wellthisisgreat

hey can you explain the appeal of Claude Code vs Cursor?

I know the context window part and Cursor RAG-ing it, but isn't IDE integration a a true force multiplier?

Or does Claude Code do something similar with "send to chat" / smart (Cursor's TAB feature) autocomplete etc.?

I fired it up but it seemed like just Claude in terminal with a lot more manual copy-pasting expected?

I tried all the usual suspects in AI-assisted programming, and Cursor's TAB is too good to give up vs Roo / Cline.

I do agree Claude's the best for programming so would love to use it full-featured version.

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I would also like to know this. I've only very briefly looked into Claude code and I may just not understand how I'm supposed to be using it.

I currently use cursor with Claude 4 Sonnet (thinking) in agent mode and it is absolutely crushing it.

Last night i had it refactor some Django / react / vite / Postgres code for me to speed up data loading over websocket and it managed to:

- add binary websocket support via a custom hook - added missing indexes to the model - clean up the data structure of the payload - add messagepack and gzip compression - document everything it did - add caching - write tests - write and use scripts while doing the optimizations to verify that the approaches it was attempting actually sped up the transfer

All entirely unattended. I just walked away for 10 minutes and had a sandwich.

The best part is that the code it wrote is concise, clean, and even stylistically similar to the existing codebase.

If claude code can improve on that I would love to know what I am missing!

My best comparison is that it's like MacBooks/iPhones etc.

Apple builds both the hardware and the software so it feels harmonious and well optimized.

Anthropic build the model and the tool and it just works, although sonnet 4 in cursor is good too but if you've got the 20$ plan often you're crippled on context size (not sure if that's true with sonnet 4 specifically).

I had actually heard about the OpenAI Codex CLI before Claude Code and had the same thought initially, not understanding the appeal.

Give it a shot and maybe you'll change your mind, I just tried because of the hype and the hype was right for once.

If you use VS: Code, install the plugin, and run Claude code from the terminal, you get the same experience as Cursor.

i rewrote a code base that i’ve been tinkering on for the last 2 years or so this weekend. a complete replatform, new tech stack, ui, infra, the whole nine yards. the rewrite took exactly 3 days, referenced the old code base, online documentation, github issues all without (mostly) ever leaving claude.

it completely blew my mind. i wrote maybe 10 lines of code manually. it’s going to eliminate jobs.

> it’s going to eliminate jobs.

that's the part i'm not sold on yet. it's a tool that allows you to do a year's work in a week - but every dev in every company will be able to use that tool, thus it will increase the productivity of each engineer by an equal amount. that means each company's products will get much better much faster - and it means that any company that cuts head count will be at risk of falling behind it's competitors.

i could see it getting rid of some of the infosec analysts, i guess. since itll be easier to keep a codebase up to date, the folks that run a nessus scan and cut tickets asking teams to upgrade their codebase will have less work available.

> it's a tool that allows you to do a year's work in a week

Exaggerations like this really don't help your credibility

How many teams of 10 took a year and USD 5 millions to develop a CRUD that failed? That can be done in one week now

I'm not sure that spending $5 Million to fail every week is actually better than spending $5 million to fail once a year

Brings a crazy new meaning to "fail fast" though

if the success rate is the same, that would be actually good

the amount isn't relevant to the argument; the point is that the amount - whatever that may be - is applied equally to all companies, which means the competitive balance will stay the same. its a great build tool, but you still need builders to use the tool.

> I fired it up but it seemed like just Claude in terminal with a lot more manual copy-pasting expected?

You should never have to copy/paste something from Claude Code...?

Claude Code has a VS Code (and therefore cursor / windsurf) extension so it will show you changes it wants to make directly in the IDE.

I still use the Cursor auto complete but the rest is all Claude Code.

Even without the extension Claude is directly modifying and creating files so you never have to copy paste.

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