[redox99]

Cursor has two benefits

1) It's still an IDE. Because of pricing I mostly use Codex, but I always have a VSCode/Cursor IDE open, thus have to juggle between the two. Working directly in the IDE is more comfortable. For full on vibecoding that might be worse, but when you want to do a deep review of the changes, an IDE is way better than reading a diff on github.

2) It supports every model. It's often very helpful to try different models when you don't like the result of the first.

[oefrha]

Cursor as an editor/IDE when you take away LLM features is just a worse VSCode (1) lacking some useful first party features, e.g. highlight of staged changes; (2) where a significant number of extensions can’t be found — yes, I know you can manually install vsix but that’s a pain. I moved back to VSCode once I no longer need Cursor’s (top notch at the time) auto complete.

Also, Cursor really pushes you to use their agent stuff, I had to close/switch just to get to the goddamn code whenever I opened something in Cursor. VSCode is still happy to be an editor where code is centered for my review.

[AussieWog93]

I'm in the same boat as gp.

They seem to be doing their darndest to kill advantage #1. Even the command line "cursor ~/git" no longer opens an IDE in the ~/git folder but some random Chatgpt-esque interface that nobody asked for. Honestly, VS Code is a better "old Cursor" now than Cursor is.

#2 hasn't been much of an issue for me since Opus 4.5 came out. Anything the other models could do, Claude could do better. Of course things are starting to change now, and I've noticed Sol Ultra is specifically better at visual design stuff than Claude, but even that ~3% of cases I switch to GPT are still more easily solved with a cheap Codex sub than Cursor.

[PufPufPuf]

You can use VSCode / Zed, run any CLI coding agent in the integrated terminal and review changes using the Git working tree diff view the IDE offers. Extensions seemingly give more ergonomy, like diffs of agent changes separate from Git, or option to comment on specific file or section, but I found out that agent CLIs don't really need that today -- most of the time they know what I mean without needing to explicitly point at code locations.

[pwython]

Can't VS Code extensions solve your use case?

[RussianCow]

They're not as good. I've tried all the options available a couple months ago, and none of them feel nearly as polished as Cursor. For one thing, Cursor Tab is just far better than any other "next edit" prediction I've used. I also happen to like their agent UI the most, but they don't support ACP, so you can't use it with Claude Code, which was a deal-breaker for me.

These days I've switched to Zed, which is good enough (and wicked fast), but I still miss Cursor as an IDE.

[redox99]

I tried the codex extension many months ago but I didn't like it. I use mostly the Codex App, or sometimes the Codex TUI inside the IDE terminal.

[roncesvalles]

The Claude plugin for VSC is amazing and basically "solves programming" for me. It's the primary way that I write code now; I even stopped using Claude Code.

[aaa_aaa]

You can use Intellij Ides, at least free ones.