Having spent a couple of weeks putting both AIDE-centric (Cursor, Windsurf) and CLI-centric (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI) options through real-world tasks, Cursor was one of the least effective tools for me. I ultimately settled on Claude Code and am very happy with it.
I realized Claude Code is the abstraction level I want to work in. Cursor et al still stick me way down into the code muck when really I only want to see the code during review. It's an implementation detail that I still have to review because it's makes mistakes, even when guided perfectly, but otherwise I want to think in interfaces, architecture, components. The low level code, don't care. Is it up to spec and conventions, does it work? Good enough for me.
