Live data from Hacker News

Cursor 3

cursor.com

171–180 of 438 posts

Re: Cursor 3

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess would be this is less driven by product philosophy, more driven by trying to maximise chances of a return on a very large amount of funding in an incredibly tough market up against formidable, absurdly well-funded competitors. It's a very tough spot they're in. They have a great product in the code-first philosophy, but it may turn out it's too small a market where the margins will just be competed away to z…

You know, it’s stuff like this making me think maybe the anti capitalists have a point. A company makes a popular product customers like, but to satisfy the VCs the company must make a product the customers don’t like but could make the VCs more money. Not sure this is the “invisible hand” Adam Smith had in mind.

In order to make more money you have to make a product customers want.

Re: Cursor 3

#172
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed completely on this (as a heavy daily user of Cursor). It's been the perfect in-between of coding by hand (never again!) and strictly "vibe coding" for me. Being able to keep my eyes on all the changes in a "traditional" IDE view helps me maintain a mental model of how my systems work. I'm hoping in this new UI in v3 I can still get that experience (maybe it's just hidden behind a toggle somewhere for power use…

> It's been the perfect in-between of coding by hand (never again!) and strictly "vibe coding" for me. I dont think there is an inbetween. Its really hard to 'keep an eye' on code by casually reading diffs. Eventually it will become vibe coding. Software engineers are deluding themselves with spec driven, plans, prds whatever nonsense and thinking its not vibecoding.

Why?

Reading diffs is an inescapable skill, needed for evaluating any kind of PR. This just makes it more interactive.

I just use Copilot with VS Code, but my flow is to just ask Claude to make a change across whatever files it needs to touch, then either accept the changes, edit the changes directly, or clarify whatever was different from my expectations.

Reading diffs is central to how I work with these agents.

Re: Cursor 3

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess would be this is less driven by product philosophy, more driven by trying to maximise chances of a return on a very large amount of funding in an incredibly tough market up against formidable, absurdly well-funded competitors. It's a very tough spot they're in. They have a great product in the code-first philosophy, but it may turn out it's too small a market where the margins will just be competed away to z…

You know, it’s stuff like this making me think maybe the anti capitalists have a point. A company makes a popular product customers like, but to satisfy the VCs the company must make a product the customers don’t like but could make the VCs more money. Not sure this is the “invisible hand” Adam Smith had in mind.

Anti-capitalist here: Our point is actually the same point as the one Anti-feudalists had. The consumer hostility observed under capitalism is simply a corollary.

Re: Cursor 3

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cursor, same as Copilot, has been used by people who are basically pair programming with the AI. So, on abstraction down. This is not really true anymore. Cursor has better cloud agents than Claude. The multi-agent experience is better, the worktree management is better. Tagging specific code or files in chat is better. It's hard for me to express the level of pain and frustration I feel going from Cursor to Claude…

I think you are still speaking in the lower abstraction in terms of zwaps' provided understanding. "Tagging specific code" or "files" is likely the type of interfacing most Claude Code users are _not_ doing. Instead they are defining architecture through specs and verification-loops and attempting to one-shot solutions fitting clear tests. On reflection, I personally don't have many prompts with CC referencing files…

I feel like perhaps you haven't used Cursor. I use both CC and Cursor extensively and as far as I can tell there is nothing that the CC agent will do that Cursor won't do just as well (often using Opus as the backend) and at the same time I get the advantage of seeing the changes in a full IDE if I want to. Their new agent-forward UI hides the code if you don't want to see it as much, but I and many others think that it giving me a full, colourful graphical editor to view changes in is a huge advantage.

I'm not telling you to go use cursor, just to help clarify that you can drive both solutions with the exact same approach and skillset and get very similar results - the difference is the UI. I personally like being able to paste screenshots into the agent, etc.

Re: Cursor 3

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cursor, same as Copilot, has been used by people who are basically pair programming with the AI. So, on abstraction down. This is not really true anymore. Cursor has better cloud agents than Claude. The multi-agent experience is better, the worktree management is better. Tagging specific code or files in chat is better. It's hard for me to express the level of pain and frustration I feel going from Cursor to Claude…

I think you are still speaking in the lower abstraction in terms of zwaps' provided understanding. "Tagging specific code" or "files" is likely the type of interfacing most Claude Code users are _not_ doing. Instead they are defining architecture through specs and verification-loops and attempting to one-shot solutions fitting clear tests. On reflection, I personally don't have many prompts with CC referencing files…

So that sounds like Claude Code is an inferior subset of Cursor. That Cursor can work like Claude Code, but Claude Code is lacking Cursor’s editing capabilities.

Re: Cursor 3

#176

Man, I wish they'd keep the old philosophy of letting the developer drive and the agent assist. I feel like this design direction is leaning more towards a chat interface as a first class citizen and the code itself as a secondary concern. I really don't like that. Even when I'm using AI agents to write code, I still find myself spending most of my time reading and reasoning about code. Showing me little snippets of…

My guess would be this is less driven by product philosophy, more driven by trying to maximise chances of a return on a very large amount of funding in an incredibly tough market up against formidable, absurdly well-funded competitors. It's a very tough spot they're in. They have a great product in the code-first philosophy, but it may turn out it's too small a market where the margins will just be competed away to z…

> It's a very tough spot they're in.

It's a very tough spot they put themselves into. If the goal wasn't to get filthy rich quick it would probably be possible to make a good product without that tough spot.

Re: Cursor 3

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, it’s stuff like this making me think maybe the anti capitalists have a point. A company makes a popular product customers like, but to satisfy the VCs the company must make a product the customers don’t like but could make the VCs more money. Not sure this is the “invisible hand” Adam Smith had in mind.

In order to make more money you have to make a product customers want.

According to the comment I replied to you have to make the product VCs think will make VCs the most money, even if that’s at odds with what your customers are telling you they want.

Re: Cursor 3

#178

Man, I wish they'd keep the old philosophy of letting the developer drive and the agent assist. I feel like this design direction is leaning more towards a chat interface as a first class citizen and the code itself as a secondary concern. I really don't like that. Even when I'm using AI agents to write code, I still find myself spending most of my time reading and reasoning about code. Showing me little snippets of…

embrace tradition, return to vscode

Re: Cursor 3

#179

Man, I wish they'd keep the old philosophy of letting the developer drive and the agent assist. I feel like this design direction is leaning more towards a chat interface as a first class citizen and the code itself as a secondary concern. I really don't like that. Even when I'm using AI agents to write code, I still find myself spending most of my time reading and reasoning about code. Showing me little snippets of…

I vibe my way through my ideas. I look at LLM code sometimes to cry and cringe and then I beg LLM to have basic dignity and self respect to write code it shouldn’t be ashamed of. But then I instruct it to do something and it does it with speed I’m never able to achieve, even if the code is ugly. But it works.
Post reply on HN