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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

I've never seen a product blow another product out of the water so hard as Claude Code did to Cursor.

The TUI version of Claude Code just isn't very good, though. The default keybindings do not work in the majority of terminals (because they generate the same byte sequences for key sequences assigned to different commands). Editing large prompts is rather painful because there doesn't seem to be in-prompt search commands. There is no source code browser, so source code references cannot checked by the users without a separate tool. Diffs cannot be copied directly because they are indented by spaces (even though some tools strip indentation from patches, it's still ugly). Switching between conversations is somewhat discouraged by the interface, which makes it harder to keep the context clean.

I think it's possible to have a better TUI, with something that isn't modeled after a shell prompt. Apparently, recent updates move in that direction. The GUI version of Claude Code seems to be coming to Linux, too.

The Claude Code TUI is downright awful, and hostile.

The tide is turning though. I was using the old non agent view in cursor every day for about a year when I built my startup with it. Then Claude Code blew it out of the water. But since two month or so I much prefer Codex and Cursor with the agent view.

However, what I see cooking at Cursor is way more promising than the others. Things like full system understanding, their own forge, multi-repo support. I'd put them as way more visionary in the Gartner magic Quadrant ;)

what do you mean by 'full system understanding', here? And don't you think that claude and openai are using their own forge as well?

What forges are we talking about here? None of them have Github competitors.

https://cursor.com/origin

Ingesting the whole codebase in their cloud and then maintaining indexes of where everything lives and what already exists. Not sure if that's where they are going but that's what I feel looking at some of the beta functionality and announcements.

For the forges, what the sibling said.

They don't index code bases anymore.

I saw that happen culturally. But never saw that much different in performance. And I really dislike terminal development. And their desktop app is really buggy.

Given you can use the same models on both, you're right about performance. However I've found the cross-session context and memory in claude code much more helpful which can lead to better outcomes faster.

Additionally helpful where 2 apps/repos might require running at the same time, e.g. headless web apps, or, for plugin development where the plugin might be a dedicated repo but needs to run in another app to observe changes and make it re-test itself.

I also switched from terminal to the app not that long ago, I don't find it buggy, it has access to a browser which is really helpful.

Out of interest when did you last use the desktop app? I am a huge daily user of it and apart from very minimal bugs, it works perfectly for me. Wasn't always the case, so they've definitely made improvements

Maybe 3 months ago?

Claude code is a decent harness but then you have to use Anthropic models, which are good but no longer the best bang for the buck.

In particular Haiku 4.5 is rubbish, Anthropic don’t have anything in the cheap/fast part of the market.

For people fortunate enough to still be on a subscription instead of per-token billing this is less relevant, but their time will come.

The cursor model is quite nice because it allows you to switch between cheap and expensive models for different tasks

I think the point is that CC was the first general use, terminal based harness. I think. Now you can use PI, or OpenCode, or whatever, and use any model you like.

Now, I’m no expert, because I was late to the game and have only ever used Pi. But I guess Cursor is some product that’s tied to your IDE? If so, then yeah. That’s just too restrictive. I still love my IDE, but I don’t want it to be my harness too.

Aider (and probably others) came well before CC.

Claude Code was very late to the party.

> Claude code is a decent harness but then you have to use Anthropic models...

Claude Code works with models from other providers too. Anthropic supports this. You can configure some Claude Code environment variables to switch: eg changing ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL to point to GLM Flash or Luna, setting ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to point to api.z.ai, and making ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN the API key for your alternative provider instead.

Some instructions here:

https://docs.z.ai/scenario-example/develop-tools/claude

That said, I've not actually tried this myself, opting to build my own harness instead. And you don't know what information Claude Code might be sending back to Anthropic about how you use competing models and which models you use. I don't know for sure that they do this, but after hearing about how they used steganography in the date of harness system prompts to identify the user's location, I don't entirely trust Claude Code anymore.

> Claude code is a decent harness but then you have to use Anthropic models

Why do you say that? I've used Claude Code with DeepSeek via OpenRouter just fine.

Cursor has a surprising amount of inertia, though, at least where I work.

I've recently moved to a company that uses Cursor, and I'm actually quite fond of it.

I basically never use the editor but the fact that there's a review UI for all the agent work is incredibly helpful.

For me, that makes the models much more usable. I've also been using GPT models a lot, as they're cheaper and less vomit inducing than Claudes text, so this is definitely bad news for me.

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