Escape from Cursor
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It may be a bit late to talk about escaping from Cursor now. Actually, over the past six months I have gradually reduced my use of Cursor, because my coding habits have changed, and Cursor’s strengths are no longer the reason I choose it. The feature with which Cursor still firmly ranks first is its unique completion model, supporting cross-line and cross-file completion in all directions. Whether in response speed or acceptance rate, no rival can match it. But I no longer use completion to hand-write code; instead, I have purchased various coding plans and heavily use agents for coding. Cursor’s agent is still very strong, but unfortunately it hasn’t opened a clear gap from Claude Code / Codex, and the coding plans sold directly by Anthropic and OpenAI are far more cost-effective than Cursor’s plans. Cursor cannot compete with model vendors on model cost-effectiveness, so Cursor must push its own Composer model to have a seat at the table. Cursor has also launched its own CLI, which I have been using for the past three months. It’s well done, so I won’t comment much. It gains competitiveness through training its own models for better cost-effectiveness and is still at the table. The main problem with Cursor now is that it is moving further away from the VSCode ecosystem, can no longer leverage the advantages of the open-source ecosystem, and finds it hard to merge features and fixes. Its self-willed design causes conflicts with usage habits. I have used VSCode for 10 years, starting from its very first month, and the shortcuts have become muscle memory. Some idiot developers at Cursor—who knows where they hired those rookies—bound my most frequently used shortcuts to their own trivial functions. After I changed them back to the old bindings, Cursor would forcibly revert them on every update. I use multiple agent tools, usually placing them all in the right sidebar, but the idiots at Cursor whimsically decided to monopolize the right sidebar, causing buttons of other agent tools to disappear—this problem persisted until the last time I opened Cursor. I am an old 500-request user, and browsing Cursor’s settings actually deducted premium request counts—incredible! Browsing the settings for a glance costs 30 cents, and three glances cost a whole dollar! At the beginning of April, Cursor simply stopped refreshing my 500-request quota. That was truly unbearable, and I had to email them to manually refresh my quota. Cursor’s closed-source nature and its clumsy modifications to the VSCode framework serve as a cautionary tale for all current VSCode distributions. Here I predict that Trae / Qoder / Lingma / Antigravity / Kiro, etc., will eventually all perish. I only use plugins that integrate into VSCode (shameless plug for my own coding-plans-for-copilot plugin, which connects any coding plan to GitHub Copilot). Cherish your time, reduce the pursuit of various new tools, and understand that true competitiveness lies only in the models.
