I am genuinely curious if any Cursor or Windsurf users who have also tried Claude Code could speak to why they prefer the IDE-fork tools? I’ve only ever used Claude Code myself - what am I missing?
While Zed's model is not as good the UI is so much better IMO.
The story I've heard is that Cursor is making all their money on context management and prompting, to help smooth over the gap between "you know what I meant" and getting the underlying model to "know what you meant"
I haven't had as much experience with Claude or Claude Code to speak to those, but my colleagues speak of them highly
It's quite interesting how little the Cursor power users use tab. Majority of the posts are some insane number of agent edits and close to (or exactly) 0 tabs.
It's interesting when I see videos or reddit posts about cursor and people getting rate limited and being super angry. In my experience tab is the number one feature, and I feel like most people using agent are probably overusing it tasks that would honestly take less time to do myself or using models way smarter than they need to be for the task at hand.
Many of my co-workers do the same. VC Code is vastly inferior when it comes to editing and actual IDE feature so it is a non-starter when you do programming yourself.
I once tried AI tab-complete on Zed and it was all right but breaks my flow. Either the AI does the editing or I do it but mixing both annoys me.
I haven't tried Claude Code VS Code extension. Did anyone replaced Cursor with this setup?
Besides that, the IDE seems poorly designed - some navigation options are confusing and it makes way too many intrusive changes (ex: automatically finishing strings).
I've since gone back to VS Code - with Cline (with OpenRouter and super cheap Qwen Coder models, Windsurf FREE, Claude Code with $20 per month) and I get great mileage from all of them.
I honestly don't know how great that is, because it just reiterates what I was planning anyways, and I can't tell if it's just glazing, or it's just drawing the same general conclusions. Seriously though, it does a decent job, and you can discuss / ruminate over approaches.
I assume you can do all the same things in an editor. I'm just comfortable with a shell is all, and as a hardcore Vi user, I don't really want to use Visual Studio.
