I’m very comfortable with the terminal, but let’s be honest. It’s not very good at certain apps. For example, copy/pasting long bits of code or strings into and out of Claude code is highly annoying. Line breaks in weird spots, because of the terminal, for example.

Anyways, I use cursor for a number of reasons:

1. I still want very quick access to the code in the editor. So I want the IDE.

2. Generally solid defaults. Auto-compaction, plan mode, etc, all work pretty well.

3. When I switched back to it from Claude code, it was genuinely faster at running Opus than Claude code. Claude code was grinding to a fucking halt every two minutes.

4. So annoying to search and view your chat history in Claude code. I’m a visual person. I also want all my repos loaded into a big workspace. Cursor also does that great out of the box.

5. I don’t have time to redo my terminal setup again to optimize it for Claude.

Tbh, I’m not aware of much that Claude code does that you can’t also do in cursor. At the end of the day, the agent loop and tools are not that different, and the model is identical.

The tool you use to prompt it is not the hard part. I just work faster when I have everything easily accessible in one spot, which was easier for me to accomplish with cursor than Claude. I found it just got out of my way.