alt Hacker NewsI was an early and passionate adopter and paying customer of Cursor (since 2023!), but it’s probably been 6 months since I opened it.
These days I “write” code with claude code and codex, and read/review it on GitHub. If I need to read it locally, I use a plain text editor.
Can someone help me understand what value cursor offers in 2026?
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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.
Cursor Tab is nice when you're hand-editing stuff. Not sure it's worth $20 though. I'd totally buy and forget a $5 Cursor subscription just for Cursor Tab.
The $20 price point is just too competitive now and I'd rather use the Claude/Codex plugin over Cursor's agentic coding sidebar.
Recently they also seem to have made big changes that makes Cursor worse for editing code by hand. I'm not sure what they are trying to do, but it doesn't feel like vscode fork anymore. I'm starting to consider alternatives.
To answer your question though, to me your workflow seems cumbersome. Cursor is more integrated and more frictionless.
Look at Cursor CLI: https://cursor.com/cli
I don't think it offers any. I got tired of switching between Codex and Claude plus I wanted to start using glm and kimi so I switch to pi. Then I got tired of VSCode eating up battery and RAM so I moved to Neovim which has barely any efficiency downside anymore since most code is not written by hand and if you know how to use it well it was only maybe 10% less efficient than VSCode to begin with. I am not sure why a heavy desktop application would be better than nvim + pi in terminal which are both super extensible via vibecoding and very light on resources.
I have tried multiple times to switch from Cursor to VSCode + command line tools or VSCode plugin for Claude, but it just doesn't work as well as Cursor itself.
Especially if you are doing "remote" development through SSH. If you are doing stuff where you still have to write some parts of the code manually or you have to fix few things here and there that the AI outputs, you still need a real editor.
The way they spin up multiple Composer 2.5 before sending it over to the model of your choice is nice.
How do you diff ?
Unless by "text editor" you mean Neovim or Emacs ?
I'm also confused about Cursor. I use Zed. It seems like whatever Cursor has is pure commodity and yet it's worth billions?
Code and reasoning generated by Opus/Fable via Cursor seems to be quite better than Claude Code's for the same prompt.
Design mode: https://cursor.com/blog/design-mode
It removes money from your pocket into theirs faster than Claude will take money out of your pocket and into theirs. I was a Windsurf then Cursor user and even provided product feedback to the Cursor team on various aspects of their product but the costs for using it killed the value.