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Comment by vercaemert | Hacker News Reader

How do you compare Claude Code to Cursor? I'm a Cursor user quietly watching the CC parade with curiosity. Personally, I haven't been able to give up the IDE experience.

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Im so sold on the cli tools that I think IDEs are basically dead to me. I only have an IDE open so I can read the code, but most often I'm just changing configs (like switching a bool, or bumping up a limit or something like that).

Seriously, I have 3+ claude code windows open at a time. Most days I don't even look at the IDE. It's still there running in the background, but I don't need to touch it.

When I'm using Claude Code, I usually have a text editor open as well. The CC plugin works well enough to achieve most of what Cursor was doing for me in showing real-time diffs, but in my experience, the output is better and faster. YMMV

I use CC for so much more than just writing code that I cannot imagine being constrained within an IDE. Why would I want to launch an IDE to have CC update the *arr stack on my NAS to the latest versions for example? Last week I pointed CC at some media files that weren't playing correctly on my Apple TV. It detected what the problem formats were and updated my *arr download rules to prefer other releases and then configured tdarr to re-encode problem files in my existing library.

I was here a few weeks ago, but I'm now on the CC train. The challenge is that the terminal is quite counterintuitive. But if you put on the Linux terminal lens from a few years ago, and you start using it. It starts to make sense. The form factor of the terminal isn't intuitive for programming, but it's the ultimate.

FYI, I still use cursor for small edits and reviews.

I don't think I can scientifically compare the agents. As it is, you can use Opus / Codex in Cursor. The speed of Cursor composer-1 is phenomenal -- you can use it interactively for many tasks. There are also tasks that are not easier to describe in English, but you can tab through them.

Just FYI, these days cc has 'ide integration' too, it's not just a cli. Grab the vscode extension.

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