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