I primarily use Cursor, compared against Claude and haven't used Codex before - to me the benefits:
- Composer 2.5 is cheap, fast, and very effective; I don't even use other models that much anymore, as it's usually marginally better for way more cost, though sometimes I do for specific things like making better translations for our app than a coding-specific model could normally output
- It makes setting up and maintaining Cloud Agents super easy, the agent can basically set up itself and if anything changes that makes it not update properly, then it tells you and can fix itself easily
- Easy to move agents from remotely in the cloud to local and vice versa
- Easy to work with agents via either comments on GitHub, or via the web app on my phone (though it is relatively constrained relative to the actual desktop UI, which is a bummer)
- Code reviews with Bugbot is surprisingly good now vs when it first came out, as is the Security Agent, while being an order of magnitude cheaper than stuff like Claude reviews
- Automations are easy to configure and manage - crons, in response to repo events, etc. For example I don't use Renovate or Dependabot much anymore since LLMs can update deps and investigate subtle breaking changes much better than a dumb version bump script can
- Limits are obvious rather than Anthropic's mysterious quota amount that they don't explain at all
- Queueing up messages rather than the agent taking in new messages mid-work and then trying to mesh them together somehow - I find queueing much more predictable and easier to work with
- Plan mode is good too, but not particularly different than any other agent
- Easy to jump into the Editor view and actually go in and manually code things or interactively code with the LLM when you need to, since sometimes LLMs just suck at doing certain things autonomously. I'm not in the "stop coding bro" camp, I still like to take the wheel fairly often.