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Comment by dfabulich | Hacker News Reader

> If you’re not already using a CLI-based agent like Claude Code or Codex CLI, you probably should be.

Are the CLI-based agents better (much better?) than the Cursor app? Why?

I like how easy it is to get Cursor to focus a particular piece of code. I select the text and Cmd-L, saying "fix this part, it's broken like this ____."

I haven't really tried a CLI agent; sending snippets of code by CLI sounds really annoying. "Fix login.ts lines 148-160, it's broken like this ___"

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Yeah I started with Cursor, went hybrid, and then in the last month or so I've totally swapped over.

Part of it is the snappy more minimal UX but also just pure efficacy seems consistently better. Claude does its best work in CC. I'm sure the same is true of Codex.

Cursor Composer appears to have this type of coupling and uses IDE resources better than other models on average.

Seems you haven't heard of Cursor 2.0

https://cursor.com/blog/2-0

Better? Hard to say. Different? Yes. Worth evaluating? Absolutely. Using it for 30 minutes will answer your question better than any reply here. I think you'll answer your own question quickly.

I've been coding seriously for about 15 years. No single tool has changed how I code more than claude code and I'm including non-"AI" tooling/services. This sounds like I'm shilling but I am not affiliated. It's played a large part in injecting my passion back into building stuff.

Claude is able to detect the lines of code selected in vscode anyway

As-is Gemini CLI and Codex. I run my CLIs in VSC and only using it as a file browser.

They all have optional ide integration, e.g Claude knows the active vscode tab and highlighted lines.

Is that better than Cursor? Same? Just different?

All I can say is when I switched from Cursor to Claude it took me less than 24 hours to realise I wouldn’t go back. The extra UI Cursor slaps on to VS Code is just bloat, which I found quite buggy (might be better now though), and the output was nowhere near as good. Maybe things have improved since I switched but Claude CLI with VS Code is giving me no reasons to want to try anything else. Cursor seemed like a promising and impressive toy, Claude CLI is just a great product that’s delivering value for me every day.

Vscode has agents built in now, have you used that UI?

That particular part is the same, roughly. The bigger issue is just that CC's a better agent than Cursor, last I checked.

There's even an official Anthropic VS Code extension to run CC in VS Code. The biggest advantage is being able to use VS Code's diff views, which I like more than in the terminal. But the VS Code CC extension doesn't support all the latest features of the terminal CC, so I'm usually still in the terminal.

Yes and you can select multiple files to give it focus. It can run anything in your PATH too. Eg it's pretty good at using `gh` and so on

Claude is just better at coding than cursor.

Really, the interface isn't a meaningful part of it. I also like cmd-L, but claude just does better at writing code.

...also, it's nice that Anthropic is just focusing on making cool stuff (like skills), while the folk from cursor are... I dunno. Whatever it is they're doing with cursor 2.0 :shrug:

Cursor can use the Claude Sonnet and Claude Opus LLMs, so I would expect output to be quite similar in that respect.

The agentic part of the equation is improving on both sides all the time.

There's something in the prompting, tooling, heuristics inside the Claude Code CLI itself that makes it more than just the model it's talking to and that becomes clear if you point your ANTROPHIC_URL at another model. The results are often almost equivalent.

Whereas I tried Kilo Code and CoPilot and JetBrain's agent and others direct against Sonnet 4 and the output was ... not good ... in comparison.

I have my criticisms of Claude but still find it very impressive.

Claude Code is much more efficient even compared to Cursor using the Anthropic models. The planning and tool use is much better.

Direct use of Codex + GPT5 or Claude Code CLI gives a better result, compared to using the same models in Cursor. I've compared both. Cursor applies some of their augmentation, which reduces the output size, probably to save on tokens.

I use Claude and Codex in VS Code and they work really well.

> I select the text and Cmd-L, saying "fix this part, it's broken like this

This flow works well.

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