Cursor vs Claude Code

Cursor vs Claude Code

My own opinions of how both products compare for software development and automating workflows.

Agentic Frameworks Seem OP

I have been fascinated with how I can outsource work to these LLMs since late 2023, when I was first playing with GPT-3.5 through a web UI. In some ways it seemed clueless and like it was just guessing, early models in 2023-2024 were only correct maybe ~55% of the time. This could on occasion cause you to get stuck in loops with it. It was still magic however, you can do a lot of damage with a magical robot that's correct half the time.

In 2026 the larger commercial models all seem to have improved substantially. My favourite model Claude seems to be fiercely accurate, compared to how any other model was a few years prior.

Agentic frameworks go beyond the web interface, allowing you to build software and automate tasks locally on your machine. They allow you to close the loop, with them being able to compile, deploy and test software on their own. They can build testing frameworks for software, test outputs for processes, then try again if anything's wrong. This ability to recurse over their own outputs repeatedly seems to magnify their accuracy.

Which AI Tool is #1?

I am not going to state that either tool is "better" than the other, they're both capable and fantastic. I'll instead just note the differences that I have experienced after trying both rather extensively in the last 6 months.

Claude is the best LLM to use in Cursor IDE, so it's often a contest of what's the optimal way to utilise Claude.

Cursor IDE

The AI powered IDE, also apparently the default IDE of choice at Nvidia. Cursor is a full fork of VSCode, giving it deep access to editor internals that a standard VSCode extension cannot reach — enabling features like inline diffs and background agents.

• The UX is a fair bit more integrated into the VSCode environment.
• Faster, seems to use more parallelism of agents
• Does better looking and clearer code-base walk-throughs
• Has more models (Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini and their in-house model Composer)
• Better at searching the internet seemingly (particularly with ChatGPT/Gemini)

Claude Code

The official VSCode extension from Anthropic, it allows similar functionality to Cursor. Letting you review, test, debug and develop code automatically and locally with the Claude model.

• Slower, seems to run tasks more sequentially
• More transparent, shows you the bash command and asks you for permission before running it
• Also has a feature-rich CLI mode, which can be extremely powerful if you're already good at bash
• The API tokens for the basic plan seem to last longer

Everything's a Programming Problem

It really seems like a wide array of problems in life can now be reduced into a folder containing relevant data/scripts, then these agentic AI tools can "cook" you up a solution (and double check it too!). I'm not yet sure where the ceiling is to this, but it's been very entertaining to try and find it. I have so far been able to do a tonne of programming, some complicated bookkeeping, and have fought RMA's and other bureaucratic disputes. I even used them to build my first robot that feeds and monitors my fish.

If you've never tried one of these tools, the next time you're dealing with any overly complex problem, sort all the relevant data into a folder and give them a try yourself.