Claude Code vs Cursor

Published on January 17, 2026

During the year of 2025 I spent a lot of time playing with different agents, genies and AI-assisted coding. Consensus is - you can deliver things with rocket speed. As an example, I have recently did a big migration of an old unfinished Django project to FastAPI + Next.js bundle and I wrote 0 lines of code. Moreover, the project is finally deployed now and you all will be able to actually use it soon. I’ve experimented with Windsurf, Kiro, Antigravity, OpenCode, Codex, Claude Code, Cursor and sticked with the last two for the daily use. They feel different in their user experience and it took me quite some time to figure out how to optimize the setup. In this blogpost I want to share some personal practices that I use for optimized efficiency in both environments and try to compare different tools available out there.

IDE vs Terminal

Cursor started as a fork of VS and until version 2.0 it was offering a standard setup of a chat window on the right of your IDE. It’s seemingly the most natural setup for developers, everything stays the same - only one extra window. You can drag-n-drop files that you want to add to the context right in the chat and you can see your codebase right in front of you. You also have a neat UI with all kinds of buttons to change the agent, see you .git worktree or choose a different model. Claude code started differently. It’s an agent that works in your terminal. You navigate to the right repo and spin off a GUI where you can say what’s your next big feature.

There will be as many different preferences as there are people on this planet, but some things stay universal. Our attention volume is limited, our internal RAM can’t keep inside too much info. And personally for this particular reason terminal agents feel much better. You don’t need to look at all of the files all the time. You are also safe from accidentally opening the wrong old terminal and be surprised by error traceback from 3 day ago. You always have less in front of your eyes and for me IT MAKES A BIG DIFFERENCE! Of course it comes with a tradeoff that you are less likely to stumble upon something new or unexpected (talking about shared bigger codebases) and you also need to make an effort to create your setup and learn the right commands. But it makes you concentrate on one single most important thing at the time - conversation with your agent about the code.

Say whaaat?

Yes. Since recently the main artifact and the center of developer’s attention is the chat, not the code itself. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t mean we have to forget about code and switch to english. Projects are still not fully native in it, haha, and it’s better to speak (or at least try) the same language with your counterpart if you want to get a good deal. In Claude Code you can still easily review the code changes, both manually and guess what? With AI✨.

List of tools that I use:

But the focus is definitely shifted. Builders are rather code reviewers (code sommeliers, lol) now than code writers. CLI agents, such as Claude Code give that simple and minimalistic interface to concentrate on the most important - your chat. You can still spend time in IDE to review things - like people in this reddit thread reddit.com, but your most important, high focus time can be spent in the terminal.

But wait, I love IDEs, and Cursor allows other LLMs…

Your attention can bloom with minimum of tabs and window in cursor too, if you use…

Agent mode!

Introduced in Cursor 2.0 and recently adopted by me for every-day use - Agent mode is a ChatGPT-like interface inside your IDE. So simple but makes so much difference in the UX, just move the agent window to the left, and you save a lot of brain energy. It works because we read from left to right (well, many cultures on this planet) and thus it’s more natural to pay attention to something on the left. The code is then ready for review and modification on the right. If you don’t use it yet, try it!

Nice comparison, we knew it already, where is the value? Give us our time back!

Well, I will share some very basic but powerful tips for optimizing both workspaces.

Cursor

I’ll skip explaining the basics such as AGENTS.md file and how and why to use context7 MCP server. You probably know it already.

1. Use summarize button in the long chats by yourself. Often

I observed my agents taking really long to proceed when I am on the 5th iteration of building something. And then it gets really slow. I bet sometimes there are situation that an agent is so much out of context window that it can’t invoke the summarize command by itself. Thus I take the lead and do it first. I guess you knew about importance of the context window from before, right?

2. Use Ask agent 50% of the time.

One of my colleagues calls it “sparring” with AI. He asks questions ad infinitum until all important things appear inside of the context. Although the Plan agent is really powerful by itself, it can sometime take a shortcut or even a wrong route and omit an important file during the research. This way, you can guide the pre-research until you know it’s enough. That way, when you switch to Plan after, 90% of the job is done.

3. Make it ask you questions. Think thoroughly

When building the plan sometimes it seems like you know what you want and how to do it. Then you get a shiny markdown file and you wonder “how did it guess and structure all my thoughts so nicely?”. But you can go a step further - make it ask you questions and make suggestions. LLM comprises way more knowledge then you do. It’s exceptionally good at frontend, backend and whatever else you need. If you are specializing at backend more, let it ask you questions and propose suggestions in the frontend. Same as you colleague would do. Then, you can do your research on what’s a better fit and why.

Claude Code

What they do differently from cursor - is that they allow a lof of customization to your workflow, especially with the 3rd party plugins. For example, in cursor you are stuck with 4 agent modes, while in claude you can make your own.

1. Learn conversation context control flow

Since your work is only about chatting with the chatbot and doing it well - learn how to manage its resource - the context.

  1. Rewind conversation with double Esc tap to jump back to a certain message in the chat where your context has not been polluted yet. You can think of it as a branching method. If you are fixing a bug and refactoring the code in the same place of your codebase, don’t do it sequentially. If you fix the bug first, then the context will be full of logs of tests or maybe long error tracebacks. You better start by (1) asking questions about this area of the code, (2) accumulate useful context, (3) fix the bug, and then get back to (2) to do the refactor.
  2. Add memories. If you saw your agent do something wrong, and that is a recurrent issue, press Esc and then use # to add a memory how it should behave in this kind of situations.

2. Use hooks

They can help you win the fight! No cap🧢. Jokes aside. My favorite one is to get a notification when the task is finished. Sometimes I am running 2-3 agents on different projects or worktrees and forget about them. Boom. Now I never gonna miss it. Besides that I also have a hook to run the full test suite, formatting, linting and type check on Stop (when the agent stops responding).

3. Build your Subagents

While hooks are good to execute scripts and code after certain actions, subagents are the same - but for executing prompts by an LLM. I use a docs-updater subagent that creates or modifies my .md files within the repo after we finish building a feature or doing a refactoring. In my CLAUDE.md I have a small reference to that subagent. BONUSINFO: I also made a prompt-based hook at the Stop action, that decides if Claude has to trigger the docs-updater subagent, to avoid token waste after formatting or small fixes.

A lot about Claude Code can be learn from their own courses, I took quite some inspiration from Claude Code in Action to learn how hooks work

Conclusion

My personal preference went after claude code. Maybe because I tried it later and it’s still a shiny thing on a shelf, or maybe because it offers more customization of my development workflow. On the other hand, I still tend to use cursor for data-heavy tasks, whenever I need to quickly have a look at a CSV or a PDF inside of the repo (as an AI engineer I work with a lot of data for experiments locally). IDE is just better suited for this than a CLI. Or maybe I have to try claude via the desktop app. Will share more then! 💥