Cursor Is Dead and Claude Code Killed it

Key Takeaways

While working on my Apple Watch fishing game, I started to notice that I had built quite of an Frankenstein of an AI workflow, which looks straight like a scene from a '90s hacker movie. I had multiple virtual desktop open, each with pairs of cursor and open code instances, each on their own Git work tree. My RAM was crying for mercy. And I had so many Chromium instances open that even my MacBook Pro sounded like it was preparing for liftoff. And that made me think like cursor, which was once the cornerstone of my AI workflow, was basically demoted to a $20 per month UI to see get diffs of changes that Codex made. And even for that purpose, the UI of Cursor contains so much bloat that I was accidentally triggering key binds that switched to entirely different layouts. So, after spending over $200 over the past year and few months, I decided to finally part ways with Cursor, the code editor I used to love so much that I even refuse to use Xcode for iOS development. So, how did it ever come so far? Let's travel back to what I think is the golden age of cursor somewhere around September of 2024. I was absolutely mind blown when I was first shown cursor. Coming from VS Code, I felt immediately at home. I could just import all my extensions and besides a chat window, the UI was exactly the same. The Pro subscription also basically gave you unlimited access to GPT40 and Cloud 3.5 Sonet, which was just an extremely good deal. However, the real MVP for me was the code completion model, which was simply miles ahead of what I had experienced with Copilot. And by just pressing tap, you were basically like a ninja jumping through your codebase, com importing functions, doing completions, pulling imports from other files, doing refactors. After installing cursor, I felt like I had become a super saiyan and wrote a code reviewer in Go, a startup generator with Expo and a YouTube AI platform all in the span of a few months. However, the first cracks in my cursor relationship started to show a few months later as Microsoft had of course realized that allowing college students to build billiondoll competitors to co-pilot by simply forking VS Code and adding a chat window wasn't really creating any shareholder value. So what happened was that the top tier VS code extensions such as pileands and their C++ extensions basically stopped working with cursor which is very annoying because I still remember that when I was doing my neural network from scratch series my MacBook just simply crashed while I tried to launch a C++ debugger in cursor. The second time I started to question my love for cursor was when they changed the pricing model from 500 fast request and unlimited slow request to just charging the model providers API prices. This was a massive nerf on their pro plan. And the worst part was that the cursor team basically tried to hide this downgrade by not even making a post explaining how this new subscription worked. This is honestly one of the dumbest things you can do because of course developers will notice that they start hitting rate limits in their favorite code editor. And after a lot of angry Reddit posts and a general loss in trust in the cursor developer team, um the cursor team finally made an apology, not really an apology post, just a clarification post explaining um what this new subscription was. And at the same time another conflict appeared and that is that cursor simply started throttling your requests extremely quick. So after only like five requests you would basically get rate limited. So even though users were now being charged API prices um the servers also just got worse over time. The appearance of cursor also started to stray further and further from the beautiful UI and simple UI that is VS Code. Um, and they were simply adding features on top that were extremely rush rushed and often broken. It seemed like they basically had fired their designer and were just using the cloud code frontend design plug-in instead. But the biggest change came with the release of cursor 2.0 which made it very clear that they were moving away from this VS Code aesthetic and the main change were some new windows entirely dedicated to agents. I didn't like this at all because the agent implementation of cursor is simply horrendous because you have to babysit it every change it makes. And besides that, they were creating entirely new windows. Also, the VS Code UI was also being updated. And almost every week, new panels were added or buttons would change location, which is of course very annoying when you're trying to create muscle memory and actually being productive with your code editor. But I still was a bit delusional and I thought as long as I have my tab model, I will be fine. I will just disable this new agent and browser modes, I will strip as much of the UI as the settings allow me to do so I can finally turn cursor back into the product I fell in love with. However, the nail in the coffin for me came when I discovered the world of CLI coding agents like Clo and Codeex. Although I had absolutely hated the agent that cursor offered, the CLI agents seemed so much more natural um to me to run them in a parallel to easily run them in parallel in my CLI and not having to babysit them too much, but just letting them run and afterwards just reviewing a git if a lot of work has been done. A codec or a cloud code subscription also gives you much more usage for $20 than just paying API prices. Especially with Codex, you can easily get up to $200 of value out of Codex, um, which is a $20 subscription. And because the agents were now writing most of the code, also the tap model of cursor, which I still really love, became less important. And if I was looking at my cursor dashboard, I just thought that I was barely using it anymore and hated that it got so bloated. So I just quit cursor altogether a few weeks ago. And in my mind, the most powerful tools right now are the CLI coding agents. So I wanted to rethink my entire workflow to make optimal use of that. Well, at first I went back to my old beloved code editor, VS Code, and just run some terminal agent next to it. However, I soon realized that there was still a lot of friction between me and the CLI agent because um you can't easily switch between the CLI and the VS Code window. It also consumes a lot of resources to run all these VS code windows. And I basically started to hate that my PC would become like a jet engine after running five browsers designed as code editors at the same time. So for the past week, I'm basically busy with my transition to the dark side as I thought instead of bringing these agents to my code editor, what if I bring my code editor to the agent? And because these all run in your terminal, this inevitably leads to terminal based text editors. So yeah, after dumping cursor, it's time for you to meet my new girlfriend Neo Vim, which together with her friend T-Max will easily allow me to view and edit code from my terminal and run multiple agents in parallel. I just hope that I won't be sucked into this rabbit hole of um modifying my Neoim setup so much that it prevents me from actually shipping products like I see with some other YouTubers. But this setup does allow me in a very lightweight way to run multiple agents in parallel and quickly view the changes they make. So far, I don't regret leaving cursor at all. I totally understand if you're newer to coding, only use like one agent at a time, and prefer a visible and clickable UI, then cursor probably still is perfect for you. However, the competition is also heating up. And if you just want more usage and also want an a a larger IDE like cursor, maybe Google Anti-gravity is better. The only thing I would still pay cursor for if is if they would just make a new VM extension for the tab model as I don't know what they sacrificed to the godhand for to get this um tab completion model but it feels like black magic that even Microsoft with the help of openi can't seem to replicate. Anyways, I wish the cursor team all the success with their new approach, but we have just drifted apart.