alt Hacker NewsI was a Cursor loyal until I was spending around $2k a week with premium models and my team had a discussion about whether we’d want to use more Cursor over hire another engineer. We unanimously agreed we’d rather hire another team member. I’m more productive than ever but I’m burning out.
Anyway, as a result, I switched to Claude Code Max and I am equally as prolific and paying 1/10th the price. I get my cake and to eat it, too. *Note there’s a Cursor Ultra, which at quick glance seems akin to Claude Code Max. Notice that both are individual plans, I believe I’m correct you benefit from choosing those token-wise over a team or enterprise plan?
Anyway, you’re right Claude Code is less ergonomic; generally slower. I was losing my mind over Opus in Cursor spinning up subagents. I don’t notice that happen nearly as frequently in Claude Code itself. I think it has to do with my relatively basic configuration. CC keeps getting better the more context I feed it though, which is stuff like homegrown linters to enforce architecture.
All to say, Cursor’s pricing model is problematic and left a bad taste in my mouth. Claude Code seems to need a bunch of hand holding at first to be magical. Pick your poison
Replies
There is no Max sub for enterprise AFAIK, are you using a private plan for work?
long term claude code user here, never used cursor, however based on my limited experience, it seems codex can code better than claude code.
> Anyway, you’re right Claude Code is less ergonomic; generally slower.
The secret in my experience is parallelization - Cursor might be faster or have better ergo for a single task, but Claude Code really shines when you have 6 tasks that are fairly independent.
If you treat CC as just another terminal tool and heavily use git worktrees, the overall productivity shoots through the window. I've been using a tool called Ouijit[1] for this (disclosure: the dev is an old colleague of mine), and I genuinely do not think I could go back to using Cursor or any other traditional IDE+agent. I barely even open the code in an editor anymore, primarily interacting through the term with Vim when I need to pull the wires out.
[1]: https://github.com/ouijit/ouijit