Cursor/Windsurf or other IDEs are not the right comparison. I do use them all the time and I don’t see them going away anytime soon or may be never.
As for the use case of “Give a simple or detailed prompt and the entire project and let the model do its stuff” codex has done much better than Claude code. Claude code assumes a lot of things and often ends up doing a lot more making the code very complex and also me having to redo it later with cursor. With codex I have not seen this issue.
I also feel that codex cli as a cli tool is much better mainly due to its OSS nature where I can choose different model. Claude really missed this big time IMHO.
Have you tried Claude Code / aider / cursor?
What did you need to do differently to get it to work functionally? I feel like the common experience has been universally poor.