Cursor 1.7

Again, I haven't used Cursor in a while, I'm mostly posting this hoping for Cunningham's Law to take effect :)

I am seeing a lot of folks talking about maintaining a good "Agent Loop" for doing larger tasks. It seems like Kilo Code has figured it out completely for me. Using the Orchestrator mode I'm able to accomplish really big and complex tasks without having to design an agent loop or hand crafting context. It switches between modes and accomplishes the tasks. My AGENTS.md file is really minimal like "write test for changes and make small commits"

Gone are the days of exhausting yourself by typing full requests like "refactor this function to use async/await." Now, simply type "refac—" and let our AI predict that you want an AI to refactor your code.

It's AI all the way down, baby.

Caught Claude 4.5 via Cursor yesterday trying to set a password to “password” on an outward facing EC2 service.

I suppose this is by design so you don't know how much you have left and will need to buy more credits.

I always preferred the deep IDE integration that Cursor offers. I do use AI extensively for coding, but as a tool in the toolbox, it's not always the best in every context, and I see myself often switching between vibe coding and regular coding, with various levels of hand-holding. And I do also like having access to other AI providers, I have used various Claude models quite a lot, but they are not the be-all-end-all. I often got better results with o3 and now GPT-5 Thinking, even if they are slower, it's good to be able to switch and test.

I always felt that the UX of tools like Claude Code encourage you to blindly do everything through AI, it's not as seamless to dig-in and take more control when it makes sense to do so. That being said, they are very similar now, they all constantly copy each other. I suppose for many it's just inertia as well, simply about which one they tried first and what they are subscribed to, to an extent that is the case for me too.

Do people think there are better autocomplete options available now? Is it a case of just using a particular model for autocomplete in whatever IDE you want to use?

1) The most useful thing about Cursor was always state management of agent edits: Being able roll back to previous states after some edits with the click of a button, or reapply changes, and preview edits, etc. But weirdly, it seems like they never recognized this differentiator, and indeed it remains a bit buggy, and some crucial things (like mass-reapply after a rollback) never got implemented.

2) Adding autocomplete to the prompt box gives me suspicion they somehow still do not understand best practices in using AI to write code. It is more crucial than ever to be clear in your mind what you want to do in a codebase, so that you can recognize when AI is deviating from that path. Giving the LLM more and earlier opportunities to create deviation is a terrible idea.

3) Claude Code was fine in CLI and has a nearly-identical extension pane now too. For the same price, I seem to get just as much usage, in addition to a Claude subscription.

I think Cursor will lose because models were never their advantage and they do not seem to really be thought leaders on LLM-driven software development.

Now with gpt-5-codex and codex vs code ext .. getting through up to 20k line changes in a day again lots of parallel jobs; but codex allows for less rework.

The job of the "engineer" has changed a lot. At 5k lines I was not reviewing every detail but it was possible to skim over what had changed. At 20k it's more looking at logs performance / arch & observation of features less code is reviewed.

Maybe soon just looking at outcomes. Things are moving quickly.

"Commands now execute in a secure, sandboxed environment. If you’re on allowlist mode, non-allowlisted commands will automatically run in a sandbox with read/write access to your workspace and no internet access."

The agentic side is nothing special and it's expensive for what you get. Even if you're the exact target audience - don't want CLI, want multiple frontier models to choose from for a fixed monthly price - Augment is both more competent and ends up cheaper.

Then for everyone else who is fine with a single model, Claude Code and now Codex are obviously better choices. Or those who want cheaper and faster through open weights models, there's Opencode and Kilo.

The mystery is that the other VC backed ones seemingly don't care or just don't put enough resources into cracking the autocomplete code, as many are still staying with Cursor purely for that - or were until CC became mainstream. Windsurf was making strides but now that's dead.

Legacy tech, but a great idea before models got good enough to use via CLI.

What this means that dozens of procedures and activities are happening at any one time in orbit, and that a Flight Director on the ground and an Astronaut in space needs to be at least cognizant or aware of (at least enough to prevent disasters and complete the tasks) -this is the greatest challenge in on-orbit work.

IE to widen this metaphor: to collect and gather complex operational data on differing parts of a system in a USEFUL way is the greatest challenge of complex work and software engineering is about controlling complexity above all.

Now at NASA, we often wrote up procedures and activities with the- "Astronauts are smart they can grok it" mindset; but during debriefs the common refrain from those at the top of pyramid was that "I don't have the mental capacity to handle and monitor dozens of systems at the same time" -Humans are very bad at getting in flow when monitoring things.. maybe if some kind of flow state was achievable like a conductor over an orchestra in orchestrating agents..but I don't see that happening with multiple parts of the codebase getting altered at the same time by a dozen agents.

Cursor and Agentic tools bring this complexity (and try to tame it through a chat window or text response) to our daily work on our desktop; now we might have dozens of AI Agents working on aspects of your codebase! Yes, its incredible progress but with this amazing technical ability comes great responsibility for the human overseer...this is the 'astronaut' in my earlier metaphor- an overburdened software engineer.

Worryingly also culture wise- management teams now expect software devs to deliver much faster, this is dangerous since we can use these tools but are forced to leave more to autopilot in hopes of catching bugs in test etc - I see that trend is to push away the human oversight into blind agents but this is the wrong model I think for now -how can I trust and agent without understanding all that it did?

To summarize, I like both Cursor and Claude Code, but I think we need better paradigms in terms of UX so that we can better handle conflicts, stupid models, reversions, better windows on what changed code-wise.. I also get the trend of creating trash-able instances in containers and killing them on failure, but we still need to understand how a code change impacts other parts of the codebase -

anyway somebody on the cursor team will not even read this post -they will just summarize the whole HN thread with AI and implement some software tickets to add another checkbox to the chat window in response.. this is not the engineering we need in response to this new paradigm of working.. we need some deep 'human' design thinking here..

VS Code accepted the challenge and upped its game.

Claude Code changed the game.

Cursor's own heavy value decrease (always part of the strategy but poorly communicated and managed) hit Cursor users hard when the cheap premium tokens honeymoon ended in recent months.

Existing users are disappointed, potential new users no longer see it as the clear class leader, because it isn't.