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by whicks 73 days ago
Agreed completely on this (as a heavy daily user of Cursor). It's been the perfect in-between of coding by hand (never again!) and strictly "vibe coding" for me. Being able to keep my eyes on all the changes in a "traditional" IDE view helps me maintain a mental model of how my systems work.

I'm hoping in this new UI in v3 I can still get that experience (maybe it's just hidden behind a toggle somewhere for power users / not shown off in the marketing materials).
2 comments
leerob 73 days ago
I'm an engineer at Cursor, can try to clarify questions here.

> I wish they'd keep the old philosophy of letting the developer drive and the agent assist. Even when I'm using AI agents to write code, I still find myself spending most of my time reading and reasoning about code.

We very much still believe this, which is why even in this new interface, you can still view/edit files, do remote SSH, go to definition and use LSPs, etc. It's hard to drive and ship real changes without those things in our opinion, even as agents continue to get better at writing code.

> I'm hoping in this new UI in v3 I can still get that experience (maybe it's just hidden behind a toggle somewhere for power users / not shown off in the marketing materials).

This new interface is a separate window, so if you prefer the Cursor 2 style, that continues to exist (and is also getting better).

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vvilliamperez 73 days ago
Once I downloaded it, it made sense. The blog post almost made me cancel my subscription because it seemed to get rid of the IDE entirely.
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whicks 73 days ago
Great, glad to hear that! Stoked to kick the tires on Cursor 3. Thanks for confirming, leerob!
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seamossfet 73 days ago
> We very much still believe this

That's good to hear, I might have jumped a little too quickly in my opinion. It's a bit of a Pavlovian response at this point seeing a product I very much love embrace a giant chat window as a UX redesign haha.

I would love to see more features on the roadmap that are more aligned with users like us that really embrace the Cursor 2 style with the code itself being the focal point. I'm sure there's a lot you can do there to help preserve code mental models when working with agents that don't hide the code behind a chat interface.

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dominotw 73 days ago
> It's been the perfect in-between of coding by hand (never again!) and strictly "vibe coding" for me.

I dont think there is an inbetween. Its really hard to 'keep an eye' on code by casually reading diffs. Eventually it will become vibe coding.

Software engineers are deluding themselves with spec driven, plans, prds whatever nonsense and thinking its not vibecoding.

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jimbokun 73 days ago
Why?

Reading diffs is an inescapable skill, needed for evaluating any kind of PR. This just makes it more interactive.

I just use Copilot with VS Code, but my flow is to just ask Claude to make a change across whatever files it needs to touch, then either accept the changes, edit the changes directly, or clarify whatever was different from my expectations.

Reading diffs is central to how I work with these agents.

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