That's basically it. You can review changes afterwards, but that's not the main point of Claude Code. It's a different workflow. It's built on the premise: given a tight and verifiable plan, AI will execute the actual coding correctly. This will work, mostly, if you use the very best models with a very good and very specific harness.
Cursor, same as Copilot, has been used by people who are basically pair programming with the AI. So, on abstraction down.
I have no idea what is better, or faster. I suspect it depends at least on the problem, the AI, and the person.
This is not really true anymore.
Cursor has better cloud agents than Claude. The multi-agent experience is better, the worktree management is better. Tagging specific code or files in chat is better.
It's hard for me to express the level of pain and frustration I feel going from Cursor to Claude / Conductor+Claude / Claude Extension for VS Code, Claude in Zed, etc.
Really hoping Claude puts more energy into Cowork as a competitor for Cursor and Codex.
Instead they are defining architecture through specs and verification-loops and attempting to one-shot solutions fitting clear tests. On reflection, I personally don't have many prompts with CC referencing files or code directly, rather I speak in specifications I can then track to a given instance of work in review.
This isn't to suggest you can't work at this abstraction in cursor or w/e interface, but the features you suggest are hardly relevant to the divide zwaps is identifying.
I'm not telling you to go use cursor, just to help clarify that you can drive both solutions with the exact same approach and skillset and get very similar results - the difference is the UI. I personally like being able to paste screenshots into the agent, etc.
What you mention as advantages and features is not something CC users use or require.
On the other hand, Claude is trained on its harness (all but confirmed by Anthropic) so CC is likely just a bit better at its level of abstraction than in cursor. And at the end, you can’t yet best the subscription.
That’s not to say Claude sucks, but I think Cursor is really underrated and not well known. I think the IDE focus hurts them with non professional developers, but try using it the same as with Claude and you’ll be surprised, I bet. You can hook it up to GitHub and never touch the IDE if you want to.
See, this is ridiculous nonsense. I can absolutely code in Cursor without seeing the code, and I've used both extensively, and they're remarkably similar. Why would I not want to be able to paste screenshots? Why would I really not want to have an IDE for when it's time to be a Real Engineer and look at the code?
I get it if you can't code and don't know what all those funny punctuation marks mean but it's pretty helpful to be able to e.g. just select germane lines of code and feed them to the agent as context so that it doesn't have to piss away tokens finding it. I guess if you don't even know your codebase at all then you can't do that - but that doesn't mean it doesn't have an advantage to be able to do it, it just means you aren't capable :shrug:
In practice, Claude is trained on its harness and the subscription is priced to best competitors such as Cursor.
This is also why Cursor tries to finetune oss models. Otherwise its performance in the CC flavor of AI coding will just be that bit worse
We have OG Cursor for the micromanagers (who want to approve/deny every line) and things like Claude Code for those who are less picky about the how, and able to be amazed at what it creates.
Then when you go back to Cursor it will still support all of those things in the settings.
Using Cursor you tend to not think about those as much since Cursor does a lot of it for you as part of the IDE integration. But it's good to refine it your own way.
But for the most part there isn't much difference.
Zed plus Claude feels more like using isolated browser extensions instead of something part of the browser (unless you pay for Zeds AI thing then the integration is marginally better).