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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

the reason to use cursor nowadays isn't the IDE (though it's helpful perhaps once a week), but how it makes running models from multiple providers trivial out of the box. I don't have to juggle keys or drop to a shell tool call, it supports calling out to e.g. gemini in a subagent natively. I have multiple models cross-reviewing plans and diffs as a matter of course.

claude code was seriously annoying with the flickering, maybe it's fixed now, I don't know.

cursor also has a (bad) cli if you need it, it seems it's mostly used to setup remote agents, but it does the job in a pinch.

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OpenCode and Pi do those things as well, and without a whole annoying IDE bundled in.

OpenCode is miserable from a security perspective. Well clarification the plans they offer where they bundled in free models that train on your use. You are then left to use an OpenRouter which I find pretty flaky for at least the leading Chinese models.

I just use my ChatGPT subscription with it. Not sure what you mean about security.

“Well clarification the plans they offer where they bundled in free models that train on your use.”

Just what I said. They offer paid plans through their tool. Said paid plans are kind of a dark pattern where it’s not immediately obvious the models are training on your data. The harness is fine but that kind of business turns me off and I am usually pretty neutral about those sorts of things.

I doubt most people use OpenCode coding plans, nor do they use OpenRouter. I use subscription plans from ChatGPT, z.ai, MiniMax & Xiaomi with OpenCode. It handles authentication with all of them seamlessly. I switch between models based on task/subtask and based on usage limits. You can get the most value out of a lot of these plans at their second-tier and they are often switching in value relative to each other, so it makes sense to arbitrage them like this.

Most of that switching is automated (oh-my-openagent - defaults sub-tasks to different roles, so for example I use MiniMax for explorer tasks and GPT 5.5 for deep design & review tasks, and GLM 5.2 for general orchestrator & most coding). If I hit usage limits it switches to a backup for that task. I'm not sure Cursor authenticates with all the subscription coding plans from all those companies - but if it does it can't be doing it any better.

I run it in a sandbox and its not phoning home.

Which is cool but I think it’s an important callout because it’s shady how they do it in my opinion.

For what it's worth, flickering in CC has been fixed since around the beginning of the year.

I still saw a lot of flickering in VS Code (I simply use CC as a terminal in VS Code, without the plugin) as of 2 weeks ago. I think it's a combination of CC bugs + Electron(?) rendering the VS Code uses for terminal.

Moved on to Zed (native Rust rendering) 2 weeks ago -> nothing flickers.

Sadly, with Fable 5 cutoff, I am actively exploring CC alternatives. Pi/OMP.sh works great as an agent (definitely better than CC). GPT is seemingly not as good as Opus, but with better agent and better skills, it probaly won't matter anyway. GPT lets you use any agent on Pro subscription.

Maybe flickering, but it's still broken in various ways. Only a few days ago I had an issue where the text I was typing was outside of the textbox frame. Resizing the terminal still maintained the broken view.

The rendering still breaks many times a day for me, in fairly catastrophic ways. Usually because I have the audacity to resize my terminal window.

Ctrl+c -> new tab -> `claude —resume` is deeply ingrained at this point.

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