alt Hacker NewsAs someone who uses Cursor, i don't understand why anyone would use CLI AI coding tools as opposed to tools integrated in the IDE. There's so much more flexibility and integration, I feel like I would be much less productive otherwise. And I say this as someone who is fluent in vim in the shell.
Now, would I prefer to use vs code with an extension instead? Yes, in the perfect world. But Cursor makes a better, more cohesive overall product through their vertical integration, and I just did the jump (it's easy to migrate) and can't go back.
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Mobile developer here. I historically am an emacs user so am used to living in a terminal shell. My current setup is a split pane terminal with one half running claude and the other running emacs for light editing and magit. I run one per task, managed by git worktrees, so I have a bunch of these terminals going simultaneously at any given time, with a bunch of fish/tmuxinator automation including custom claude commands. I pop over to Xcode if I need to dig further into something.
I’ve tried picking up VSCode several times over the last 6-7 years but it never sticks for me, probably just preference for the tools I’m already used to.
Xcode’s AI integration has not gone well so far. I like being able to choose the best tool for that, rather than a lower common denominator IDE+LLM combination.
Now that I can do a lot with 3-6 AI agents running usefully 2-5min at a time to crank through my plans, the IDE is mostly just taking valuable space
For backend/application code, I find it's instead about focusing on the planning experience, managing multiple agents, and reviewing generated artifacts+PRs. File browsers, source viewers, REPLs, etc don't matter here (verbose, too zoomed-in, not reflecting agent activity, etc), or at best, I'll look at occasionally while the agents do their thing.
What’s an example of? The only thing I can think of is providing approval per section, but that doesn’t really scale well
Multi-agents.
I don't understand what you gain by using an "integrated IDE with AI". No snark, really asking please share always eager to learn better workflows.
I use VS Code, open a terminal with VS Code, run `claude` and keep the git diff UI open on the left sidebar, terminal at the bottom.
It is very easy to open multiple terminals, have them side by side, do different things. It is more natural to invoke agents and let them do their things.
I agree. I did most of my work in vim/cli (still often do), but the tight agent integrations in the IDEs are hard to beat. I'm able to see more in cursor (entire diffs), and it shows me all of the terminal output, whereas Claude Code hides things from you by default, by only showing you a few pieces and summaries of what it did. I do prefer to use CC for cli usage though (e.g. using aws cli, Kubernetes, etc). The tab-autocomplete is also excellent.
I also like how cursor is model-agnostic. I prefer codex for first drafts (it's more precise and produces less code), for Claude when less precision or planning is required, and other, faster models when possible.
Also, one of cursor's best features is rollback. I know people have some funky ways to do it in CC with git work trees etc, but it's built into cursor.