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Zed Agentic mode, Cursor, and Visual Studio Code with GitHub Copilot all have the same developer experience. That's what I'm confused about.

Cursor seems like the weakest player of the three, because it's just a Visual Studio Code fork.

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This is where it starts to get subjective, but changing one part of the toolkit can have a huge effect on the quality of the assistant. For example I tried GPT 4.1 instead of Claude 4 recently and it took my setup from improving my productivity by 3-5x on coding tasks to, like, 0.5x. I can't point to a specific change other than tasks went from being done in 5 minutes if back and forth to being only partly done in 15 minutes.

I haven't used VSC in a year or Cursor at all, but I hear similar things from colleagues.

Annoyingly I'm finding cursor's autocomplete to be better than others, even though it's agent editing is not as good as claude code.

So I'm using CC in cursor (the little integration is nice) to get the best of both. None of cursors other AI features are helping though.

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