I've been using Claude code and cursor in a similar way for different projects and the results are very similar. At some point with Claude code I need to switch to CC + VSCode because I need to have more understanding of the code and start getting involved, at which point I prefer cursor because it's integrated at the start.

I haven't tried AI studio as the article suggests. I might give it a go. Last time I tried the Google models although there had larger context they still didn't code as well as anthropic models.

Hi. I'm an engineer at Cursor.

> By prioritizing the vibe coding use case, Cursor made itself unusable for full-time SWEs.

This has actually been the opposite direction we're building for. If you are just vibing, building prototypes or throwaway code or whatever, then you don't even need to use an IDE or look at the code. That doesn't really make sense for most people, which is why Cursor has different levels of autonomy you can use it for. Write the code manually, or just autocomplete assistance, or use the agent with guardrails - or use the agent in yolo mode.

> One way to achieve that would be to limit the number of lines seen by an LLM in a single read: read first 100 lines

Cursor uses shell commands like `grep` and `ripgrep`, similar to other coding agents, as well as semantic search (by indexing the codebase). The agent has only been around for a year (pretty wild how fast things have moved) and 8 months or so ago, when models weren't as good, you had to be more careful about how much context you let the agent read. For example, not immediately putting a massive file into the context window and blowing it up. This is basically a solved problem today, more or less, as models and agents are much better are reliably calling tools and only pulling in relevant bits, in Cursor and elsewhere.

> Try to write a prompt in build mode, and then separately first run it in plan mode before switching to build mode. The difference will be night and day.

Agree. Cursor has plan mode, and I generally recommend everyone start with a plan before building anything of significance. Much higher quality context and results.

> Very careful with asking the models to write tests or fix code when some of those tests are failing. If the problem is not trivial, and the model reaches the innate context limit, it might just comment out certain assertions to ensure the test passes.

Agree you have to be careful, but with the latest models (Codex Max / Opus 4.5) this is becoming less of a problem. They're much better now. Starting with TDD actually helps quite a bit.

This is a fairly well written article which captures the current state of the art correctly.

And then goes on to recommend AI Studio is a primary dev tool?! Baffling.

Not sure, after reading so many times that Cursor was cooked, I got a license from my company and I'm loving it. I had tried Claude Code before, though only briefly and for small things; I don't really see much difference between one and the other. Cursor (Opus 4.5) has been able to perform complex changes across multiple files, implement whole new features, fix issues in code and project setup... I mean, it just feels like peer programming, and I never got the feeling of running into hard limits. Am I missing much, or Cursor has simply improved recently (or it depends on the license)?

"You should remain in charge, and best way to do that is to either not use agentic workflows at all (just talk to Gemini 2.5/3 Pro in AI Studio) or use OpenCode, which is like Claude Code, but it shows you all the code changes in git diff format, and I honestly can't understand how anyone would settle for anything else."

I 100% agree with the author here. Most of the "LLMs are slowing me down/are trash/etc" discussions I've had at work usually come from people who are not great developers to begin with - they end up tangled into a net of barely vetted code that was generated for them.

Maybe my job is just too easy, but all the hoops that folks jump through to get the magic oracle to do the thing takes longer than if I just Did The Thing

These complaints are about technical limitations that will go away for codebase-sized problems as inference cost continues its collapse and context windows grow.

There are literally hundreds of engineering improvements that we will see along the way like a intelligent replacement to compacting to deal with diff explosion, more raw memory availability and dedicated inference hardware, models that can actually handle >1M context windows without attention loss, and so on.

> ask it explicitly to separate the implementation plan in phases

This has made a big difference my side. prompt.md that is mostly very natural language markdown. Then ask LLM to turn that into a plan.md that contains phases emphasising that each should be fairly selfcontained. This usually needs some editing but is mostly fine. And then just have it implement each phase one by one.

looks like a very ignorant,"I like to do it my way" article. Cursor literally allows you to do everything author said it can't. including doing commits to git etc.

Gemini 2.5 pro is no match at all to Opus 4.5 in Max mode, you can argue of latest gen , gemini 3 pro, or GPT 5.2 or something else, but not gemini 2.5.

it also has a quick model that helps with manual edit.

Copy paste from chat windows is so ... 2023. It's such a loss of productivity regardless of what you believe. Cursor gives you ability to see the changes, edit changes all using powerful GUI, no matter if you like agentic ai or not.

Gemini's large context window is incredible. I concatenate the my entire repo and repos of supporting libraries and then ask it questions.

My last use case was like this : I had a old codebase code that was using bakbone.js for ui with jquery and a bunch of old js with little documentation to generat UI for a clojure web application.

Gemini was able to unravel this hairball of code and guiding me step by step to htmx. I am not using AI studio; I am using Gemini subscription.

Since I manually patch the code, its like pair programming with an incredibly patient and smart programmer.

For the record, I am too old for vibe coding .. I like to maintain total control over my code and all the abstractions and logic.

This seems like I just read an advertisement. Or submarine article as PG would say.

AI studio is just another IDE like cursor so its a very odd choice to say one is bad and the other is the holy grail:)

But I guess this is what guerilla advertising is these days.

  Just another random account with 8 karma points that just happens to post an article about how one IDE is bad and its almost identical cousin is the best

This article makes a lot of definitive claims about capabilities of different models that don't align with my experience with them. Its hard to take any claim serious without completely understanding the state of the context when the behavior was observed. I don't think its useful to extrapolate a single observation into generalized knowledge about a particular model.

Can't wait until we have useful heuristics for comparing LLM's. This is a problem that comes up constantly (especially in HN comments...)

"All those moments..."

Appropriate.

https://youtu.be/HU7Ga7qTLDU?si=8BL4vOTJ9DLacu_V

> The context is king

Agree

> and AI Studio is the only serious product for human-in-the-loop SWE

Disagree. I use Claude Code and Codex daily, and I couldn’t be happier. Had started with Cursor, switched to CLI based agents and never looked back. I use WezTerm, tmux, neovim, Zoxide, and create several tabs and panes and run claude code not only for vibe coding, scripting, analysing files, letting it write concepts, texts, documentation. Totally different kind of computing experience. As if I have several assistants 24/7 at my fingertips.