AFAICT it really is just a preference for terminal vs IDE. The terminal folks often believe terminal is intrinsically better and say things like “you’re still using an IDE.” Yegge makes this quite explicit in his gastown manifesto.
I been using Unix command lines since before most people here were born. And I actively prefer cursor to the text only coding agents. I like being able to browse the code next to the chat and easily switch between sessions, see markdown rendered properly, etc.
On fundamentals I think the differences are vanishing. They have converged on the same skills format standards. Cursor uses RAG for file lookups but Claude reads the whole file - token efficiency vs completeness. They both seem to periodically innovate some orchestration function which the other copies a few weeks later.
I think it really is just a stylistic preference. But the Claude people seem convinced Claude is better. Having spent a bunch of time analyzing both I just don’t see it.
I been using Unix command lines since before most people here were born. And I actively prefer cursor to the text only coding agents. I like being able to browse the code next to the chat and easily switch between sessions, see markdown rendered properly, etc.
On fundamentals I think the differences are vanishing. They have converged on the same skills format standards. Cursor uses RAG for file lookups but Claude reads the whole file - token efficiency vs completeness. They both seem to periodically innovate some orchestration function which the other copies a few weeks later.
I think it really is just a stylistic preference. But the Claude people seem convinced Claude is better. Having spent a bunch of time analyzing both I just don’t see it.