Claude Code is where you move up one abstraction layer. Almost everyone using it productively has spend a lot of time working on their harness, ensuring that everything is planned out and structured such that all that is left is really type in the code. This typically works without error. Before that, you interact a lot via Claude Code in whatever abstraction you feel is right.

That's basically it. You can review changes afterwards, but that's not the main point of Claude Code. It's a different workflow. It's built on the premise: given a tight and verifiable plan, AI will execute the actual coding correctly. This will work, mostly, if you use the very best models with a very good and very specific harness.

Cursor, same as Copilot, has been used by people who are basically pair programming with the AI. So, on abstraction down.

I have no idea what is better, or faster. I suspect it depends at least on the problem, the AI, and the person.

It's good to try Claude Code just so you focus on skills, agents, and CLAUDE.md

Then when you go back to Cursor it will still support all of those things in the settings.

Using Cursor you tend to not think about those as much since Cursor does a lot of it for you as part of the IDE integration. But it's good to refine it your own way.

But for the most part there isn't much difference.

You don't have to stop using the IDE just because you are using Claude Code. Using both at the same time is best of both worlds in my experience.

Claude Code isn't really "all terminal" if you embed that terminal in your IDE. I still use Cursor (for now), but I embed a CC panel via extension. With this launch of Cursor 3, I'll probably get off Cursor for good. I have zero interest in this.

As someone whose work enforced a switch from Cursor to Claude Code, I do keep on top of the code by pairing it with an IDE, tracking/viewing changes etc. There's no real obstacle to using an IDE as you normally would, with Claude Code as a sidecar.

I run Claude Code from Zed. Very nice experience.