Comment by dirtbag__dad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dirtbag__dad | Hacker News Reader

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I was a Cursor loyal until I was spending around $2k a week with premium models and my team had a discussion about whether we’d want to use more Cursor over hire another engineer. We unanimously agreed we’d rather hire another team member. I’m more productive than ever but I’m burning out.

Anyway, as a result, I switched to Claude Code Max and I am equally as prolific and paying 1/10th the price. I get my cake and to eat it, too. *Note there’s a Cursor Ultra, which at quick glance seems akin to Claude Code Max. Notice that both are individual plans, I believe I’m correct you benefit from choosing those token-wise over a team or enterprise plan?

Anyway, you’re right Claude Code is less ergonomic; generally slower. I was losing my mind over Opus in Cursor spinning up subagents. I don’t notice that happen nearly as frequently in Claude Code itself. I think it has to do with my relatively basic configuration. CC keeps getting better the more context I feed it though, which is stuff like homegrown linters to enforce architecture.

All to say, Cursor’s pricing model is problematic and left a bad taste in my mouth. Claude Code seems to need a bunch of hand holding at first to be magical. Pick your poison

> Anyway, you’re right Claude Code is less ergonomic; generally slower.

The secret in my experience is parallelization - Cursor might be faster or have better ergo for a single task, but Claude Code really shines when you have 6 tasks that are fairly independent.

If you treat CC as just another terminal tool and heavily use git worktrees, the overall productivity shoots through the window. I've been using a tool called Ouijit[1] for this (disclosure: the dev is an old colleague of mine), and I genuinely do not think I could go back to using Cursor or any other traditional IDE+agent. I barely even open the code in an editor anymore, primarily interacting through the term with Vim when I need to pull the wires out.

[1]: https://github.com/ouijit/ouijit

Cursor can do that well too. Their code review feature usually gives a handful of independent feedbacks. I just trigger agents independently for all of those. Other integrations with Linear and Slack are also very handy to getting into this workflow. Seems like the 3.0 version is aiming at getting better at this use case.

FWIW I'm not saying Cursor is not capable of this, but that all of the 'Cursor' bits are superfluous, and using tools that bring you closer to the 'bare metal' of the terminal actually give you both more flexibility (I can run Claude Code, Crush, Codex, OpenCode, etc) and remove an entire layer of abstraction that I believe hinders a devs ability to really go all in on agentic engineering.

I started using Cursor and it was my daily driver for a year or two, but I haven't looked back once in regret moving more towards a terminal focused workflow. (Not to mention the pricing of Cursor being absolutely abysmal as well, although often comped by employers)

You do know they have an agent that runs in the terminal, right?

I think intellij idea can git worktree for agents as well.

long term claude code user here, never used cursor, however based on my limited experience, it seems codex can code better than claude code.

I've been using Codex since before ChatGPT (the OG version) and CC since launch. For me personally - Claude Code with Opus/Sonnet generally has better taste, more personality in interactions, and is more willing to just do the work. Paired with skills, LSPs, linters, and hooks, it works very well. I think of the two like this:

Claude Code with Opus/Sonnet is the L7 senior engineer still gunning for promotion. Hasn't hit burnout, hasn't been ground down by terrible teams yet. Capable and willing to get their hands dirty. Codex (the harness) with GPT-5.4 or 5.3-codex is fantastic but terse. Some of the UX frustrates me. I want a visual task list. That said, Codex as a harness is phenomenal. Think of it as the senior EM / CTO-in-waiting who won't write new code without complaining and nitpicking for hours. But they'll thoroughly tear your code apart and produce a plan you can execute yourself or pass to Claude Code.

Both are great, and so is Factory Droid. Also worth checking out Compound Engineering from Every.to if you haven't.

here is example of project i worked using codex, it took 10 iterations just to get github actions right https://github.com/newbeelearn/whisper.cpp . you can see the commits made by codex. Project was quite simple it needs to modify whisper to add support for transcribing voice with start/stop keys and copy the transcription to clipboard when stopped. That's it. It performs poorly as compare to CC which gets it right in one shot.

There’s a reason it’s 10x cheaper. You’ll be paying the real price after the subsidies end.

There is no Max sub for enterprise AFAIK, are you using a private plan for work?

Yes. This seemed to be more cost effective.

It is. Those plans are probably priced at marginal cost. Enterprise is 4x the cost or more.

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