I did my own experiment with Claude Code vs Cursor tab completion. The task was to convert an Excel file to a structured format. Nothing fancy at all.

Claude Code took 4 hours, with multiple prompts. At the end, it started to break the previous fixes in favor of new features. The code was spaghetti. There was no way I could fix it myself or steer Claude Code into fixing it the right way. Either it was a dead-end or a dice roll with every prompt.

Then I implemented my own version with Cursor tab completion. It took the same amount of time, 4 hours. The code had a clear object-oriented architecture, with a structure for evolution. Adding a new feature didn't require any prompts at all.

As a result, Claude Code was worse in terms of productivity: the same amount of time, worse quality output, no possibility of (or at best very high cost of) code evolution.