My guess would be this is less driven by product philosophy, more driven by trying to maximise chances of a return on a very large amount of funding in an incredibly tough market up against formidable, absurdly well-funded competitors.

It's a very tough spot they're in. They have a great product in the code-first philosophy, but it may turn out it's too small a market where the margins will just be competed away to zero by open source, leaving only opportunity for the first-party model companies essentially.

They've obviously had a go at being a first-party model company to address this, but that didn't work.

I think the next best chance they see is going in the vibe-first direction and trying to claim a segment of that market, which they're obviously betting could be significantly bigger. It's faster changing and (a bit) newer and so the scope of opportunity is more unknown. There's maybe more chances to carve out success there, though honestly I think the likeliest outcome is it just ends up the same way.

Since the beginning people have been saying that Cursor only had a certain window of time to capitalise on. While everyone was scrambling to figure out how to build tools to take advantage of AI in coding, they were one of the fastest and best and made a superb product that has been hugely influential. But this might be what it looks like to see that window starting to close for them.

Yeah, this model where you don't get an editor anymore feels like a step backwards. I don't want to give up LSPs, being able to step into/rename functions and stuff like that. I should still be the one in control of the code - the agent is the assistant, not me.

This is why Zed's direction felt pretty strong to me. Unfortunately their agentic features are kind of stagnating and the ACP extensions are riddled with issues.

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).

How would they make money from the tokens then haha? The main revenue driver of these companies is to get people to use more tokens. That’s what they will optimise for. Getting the developers out of the way is the way to do it.

As a Cursor user who hasn't tried Claude Code yet, am I missing anything? I seem (sometimes) exceptionally productive in it and it's working for me. To my understanding, Claude Code is all terminal, but something like an IDE seems like the better interface to me: I want to see the file system, etc. It seems Cursor doesn't have the mindshare relative to Claude in public discussion spaces.

AI labs think they’re building an autonomous replacement for software engineers, while software engineers see these systems as tools to supplement the process of software engineering.

> I still want to _code_ not just vibe my way through tickets.

Now we have 3 ways of coding:

* vim / emacs - full manual

* VSCode / IntelliJ - semi-automatic

* ClaudeCode/Codex/OpenCode/... - fully automated

Cursor can't stay in between

I vibe my way through my ideas. I look at LLM code sometimes to cry and cringe and then I beg LLM to have basic dignity and self respect to write code it shouldn’t be ashamed of. But then I instruct it to do something and it does it with speed I’m never able to achieve, even if the code is ugly. But it works.

That philosophy wouldnt help justify the narrative for their massive valuation.

> I still want to _code_ not just vibe my way through tickets.

You and I want this. My EMs and HoEs and execs do not. I weep for the future of our industry.

I just upgraded and you can still show/hide the entire editor like before

Agent is where tokens are consumed, and where they can charge you more.

I guess they are assuming LLMs will just get better and better until youn don't look at code at all.

Ignoring the fact that software will just keep getting more and more complex and interconnected... There will always be a new frontier or code and UX

> I feel like this design direction is leaning more towards a chat interface as a first class citizen and the code itself as a secondary concern.

That's because that's exactly where we're headed, and it's fine.

Imagine you are the top engineer of your company. Everybody wants your attention, many meetings, design sessions, and of-course code reviews.

With Claude Code, I use Gitlab for reviewing code. And then I let Claude pull the comments.

It looks like the new UI has a big focus on multiple agents. While it feels wrong, the more you split up your work into smaller merge requests, the easier it is to review the work.

Chat first is the way to go since you want the agent busy making its code better. Let it first make plans, come up with different ideas, then after coding let it make sure it fully tests that it works. I can keep an agent occupied for over a hour with e2e tests, and it’s only a couple hundred lines of code in the end.

embrace tradition, return to vscode

The philosophy still works, you just have to change your view. Instead of trying to work side by side with the agent on every turn (inside of your IDE), instead the agent performs a unit of work and then you review it. You can use your IDE to view the diff, or another diffing tool.

If you've dug in sufficiently on plan mode, then what the agent is executing is not a surprise and shouldn't need input. If it does, the plan was insufficient and/or the context around the request (agents.md, lessons.md, or whatever tools and documents you use ) weren't sufficient.

EDIT: Maybe it doesn't work in cursor, but I continue to use vscode to review diffs and dig in on changes.

Then code.

At least these are IDEs with the save button finally gone

We needed that jump, there were still floppy disk icons

Why I harp on owning your stack instead of outsourcing your Ai experience and interface to Big Ai. There are many frameworks that make this much easier today. I chose ADK which is more of a lift, but also works for non-coding use cases.

that is what is catching the most users right? they want to vibe code their way into oblivion

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