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 repo in a chat window and changes made by the agent in a PR type visual does not help with this. If anything, it makes it more confusing to keep the context of the code in my head.

It's why I use Cursor over Claude Code, I still want to _code_ not just vibe my way through tickets.

That philosophy wouldnt help justify the narrative for their massive valuation.

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 users / not shown off in the marketing materials).

I'm an engineer at Cursor, can try to clarify questions here.

> I wish they'd keep the old philosophy of letting the developer drive and the agent assist. Even when I'm using AI agents to write code, I still find myself spending most of my time reading and reasoning about code.

We very much still believe this, which is why even in this new interface, you can still view/edit files, do remote SSH, go to definition and use LSPs, etc. It's hard to drive and ship real changes without those things in our opinion, even as agents continue to get better at writing code.

> 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 users / not shown off in the marketing materials).

This new interface is a separate window, so if you prefer the Cursor 2 style, that continues to exist (and is also getting better).

Once I downloaded it, it made sense. The blog post almost made me cancel my subscription because it seemed to get rid of the IDE entirely.

> We very much still believe this

That's good to hear, I might have jumped a little too quickly in my opinion. It's a bit of a Pavlovian response at this point seeing a product I very much love embrace a giant chat window as a UX redesign haha.

I would love to see more features on the roadmap that are more aligned with users like us that really embrace the Cursor 2 style with the code itself being the focal point. I'm sure there's a lot you can do there to help preserve code mental models when working with agents that don't hide the code behind a chat interface.

Great, glad to hear that! Stoked to kick the tires on Cursor 3. Thanks for confirming, leerob!

AI labs think they’re building an autonomous replacement for software engineers, while software engineers see these systems as tools to supplement the process of software engineering.

Yeah that's the disconnect though right? Even with the best frontier models, you need to do a lot of system design work, planning, and reviewing before you can let these models run.

These models are infinitely more effective when piloted by a seasoned software engineer and that will always be the case so long as these models require some level of prompting to function.

Better prompts come from more knowledgeable users, and I don't think we can just make a better model to change that.

The idea we're going to completely replace software engineers with agents has always been delusional, so anchoring their roadmap to that future just seems silly from a product design perspective.

It's just frustrating Cursor had a good attitude towards AI coding agents then is seemingly abandoning that for what's likely a play to appease investors who are drunk on AI psychosis.

Edit: This comment might have come off more callous than I intended. I just really love Cursor as a product and don't want to see it get eaten by the "AI is going to replace everything!" crowd.

AI labs won't replace all of the engineers, while engineers becoming more productive, leads to smaller team sizes.

Agent is where tokens are consumed, and where they can charge you more.

I just upgraded and you can still show/hide the entire editor like before

What would all these companies do without Microsoft shipping VS Code as open source, probably still stuck with vi and Emacs.

Still curious which ones will survive when the AI gold diggers finally settle.

Sounds like cursor is not using vscode anymore in this release?

There's also Eclipse.

Oh my god, this comment gave me flashbacks to when I was writing android apps in Eclipse + ADT

So it has converged to the same UI/UX as the Claude/Codex desktop apps. If that's the case, why use Cursor over those more canonical apps?

1. Cursor is multi-model, meaning you can use at least a dozen different models.

2. Cursor's UI allows you to edit files, and even have the good old auto-complete when editing code.

3. Cursor's VSCode-based IDE is still around! I still love using it daily.

4. Cursor also has a CLI.

5. Perhaps more importantly, Cursor has a Cloud platform product with automations, extremely long-lived agents and lots of other features to dispatch agents to work on different things at the same time.

Disclaimer: I'm a product engineer at Cursor!

I hope this comes off as constructive criticism, but I'm confused about what cursor is now.

Cursor is an IDE and an agentic interface and a cli tool and a platform that all work locally and and in the cloud and in the browser and supports dozens of different models.

I don't know how to use the thing anymore, or what the thing actually is.

Is there going to be any more development on the frontier of cursor tab completion and features like that (more focused on helping engineer's with llm's for complex tasks) since I feel this is the main reason I dont use claude code or codex. I want to be writing the code, since I want performant, small, codebases that I understand (I am writing eBPF stuff, so agentic coding doesnt work that well)

You can use almost any model with Claude Code.

Brand recognition. Since "model-is-the-service", various previously-interesting companies become thin API resellers and the moat is between "selling a dollar for fifty cents" and Brand awareness.

I am not saying this in bad faith. Model companies cannot penetrate every niche with the same brand recognition as some other companies you would consider as "API resellers" do.

I kinda quit using it. The tab feature is useful when making minor or mundane changes, but I quite prefer the codex GUI if I am going to be relatively hands off with agents.

Model independence

That gap was closed by opencode months ago.

different products - CLI vs apps

Not really, no. Coding CLIs are hugely popular with the "App user" crowd, see Claude Code.

I won’t, but it does have a couple features Codex lags, including remote SSH (huge, because the easiest way to sandbox your agent is to put it into a VM), and the ability to kicking things of on your mobile and finishing up on your desktop (again, really nice if you get a good idea out on a walk, or while talking to a colleague.

These are features I am sure Codex will soon have, of course.

Then there is the advantage of multiple models: run a top level agent with an expensive model, that then kicks of other models that are less expensive - you can do this in Claude Code already (I believe), but obviously here you are limited to something like Haiku.

So funny , I remember their talk about re-imagining their editor for the future of agents. They end up copying codex gui lol.

These AI companies are running out of ideas, and are desperate. I can't imagine investing in companies that are 3 month behind open source alternatives, and their target audience being the most experimental kind there is.

Looks pretty though.

Looks like they're now playing catchup.

What's the pitch for using Cursor now a days?

I hope we can use it like non-agent developers where code is first class citizen.

Glass was a codename while the UI was in early alpha with testers. It redirects to download now because there is no special link anymore. It's just part of Cursor 3 itself.

Funny how in this space, once a company feels dead, you don’t even check out their release if the video looks decent, it would have to be totally revolutionary.

Looking at the video cursor 3 UI looks very similar to the one I experience using OpenCode :D

Maybe I'm old, but I only recently started using Gemini to assist me in coding. Now it seems everyone is heading to giving agents to do the full-blown coding. I guess if the result code is good, it doesn't matter who's coding (me or AI).

But are they affordable already for developers who don't earn a Silicon Valley salary? Developers in 3rd world countries?

I'm not convinced people who are doing real work on production applications with any sizable user base is writing code through only agents. There's no way to get acceptable code from these models without really knowing your code base well and basically doing all the systems thinking for the model.

Your workflow is probably closer to what most SWEs are actually doing.

This seems like a mix of Claude Code and Superset (https://superset.sh/). Interested to try it out and see how well it performs all the same.

Cursor is so good for what I do is that I've cancelled my Cursor subscription and went back to VSCode (w/o Copilot) for the diff review and code navigation.

I'm not following at all?

Thought I'd give it a try and installed the latest version. Application crashes at startup on Linux (Wayland) with: "The window terminated unexpectedly (reason: 'crashed', code: '139')". Probably yet another instance of developers mostly testing and doing quality assurance on macOS/Windows.

So they are just turning into another vibe code slop app?

At least before they were tangentially still an actual developer tool, standard vsc windows, the code was the point etc.

Now they offer really nothing interesting for professionals.

All the VS code stuff is literally still there

Stop fucking my shit up please