A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

The author doesn't make it clear why they switched from Cursor to Claude. Curious about what they can do with Claude that can't be done with Cursor. I use both a lot and find Cursor to be superior for the very large codebases I work in.

It's easy: Cursor are resellers, they optimize your token usage, so they can make a profit. Claude is the final point, and they offer tokens for the cheapest price possible.

Personal opinion:

Claude code is more user friendly than cursor with its CLI like interface. The file modifications are easy to view and it automatically runs psql, cd, ls , grep command. Output of the commands is shown in more user friendly fashion. Agents and MCPs are easy to organized and used.

I feel just the opposite. I think Cursor's output is actually in the realm of "beautiful." It's well formatted and shows the user snippets of code and reasoning that helps the user learn. Claude is stuck in a terminal window, so reduced to monospaced bullet lines. Its verbose mode spits out lines of file listings and other context irrelevant to the user.

I use Cursor in MAX mode because my employer pays for the tokens. I probably should have mentioned that in my OP. It makes a huge difference.

Pretty much everyone I talk to prefers the opposite, and feels like Claude performs best inside the Claude Code harness and not the Cursor one. But I suppose different strokes for different folks...

Personally I'm a Neovim addict, so you can pry TUIs out of my cold dead hands (although I recognize that's not a preference everyone shares). I'm also not purely vibecoding; I just use it to speed up annoying tasks, especially UI work.

Can you elaborate on “huge”?