I kind of want to try it, to see if and how far they can take an open model and improve it but I really don’t miss the Cursor user experience. Constant UI changes, half-baked features, smaller and smaller limits, useless AI change attribution; I think I’ll wait for others to report if it’s any good.
Noticed recently they keep opening their “Agents” window when the project was last opened in the VSCode fork window in the hopes I’ll just continue working in that when the UI is totally different and missing things I need.
For a professional tool it’s getting egregious how little respect they have for my workflows and flow state they way they keep moving, changing iconography and flipping switches of the UI.
It’s clearly being ran by someone who comes from a social app or sales app growth hacking background.
> It’s clearly being ran by someone who comes from a social app or sales app growth hacking background.
I fixed that by using cursor the agent but not the UI.
I'm just running cursor in GNU Emacs via agent-shell (https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell). Their cli client (aptly named "agent") supports ACP (agent client protocol) so the UI can be skipped altogether.
I know this sounds like a meme ("use x in emacs") but at this point at the very least i can keep my workflows and my UI all the same and focus on my work rather than "where did $company put $feature this month".
It seems obvious that they plan to eventually drop VSCode.
I'd be willing to take them up on that offer. Their agent window is genuinely better as a starting point.
What annoys me is how little they want to integrate with ...anything. Wanna open a link in your default browser? Use our built-in chromium fork, we insist. Wanna open a location in Zed? No, please use our half-baked editor re-implementation. Wanna open a location in Cursors own vscode-based editor? You can't. Managed to work around that somehow? We changed your files to "Worktree TS", disabling all your language servers. It's like programming on an iPhone.
It’s a near constant regression in my workflows. “Multiple agents” got destroyed recently, and the new interface for it some sort of command isn’t as good or reliable. Then you’ve got modals everywhere[1] and truncated bits (like long branch names) that make it insanely frustrating to use.
They’re constantly changing the UI without actually improving it at all. I’ll likely cancel it and use opencode for personal stuff with Deepseek and only use it at work because I have to. There was a time when I appreciated the harness but it’s becoming less useful, or at least noticeable, over time… all the while the actual UI becomes substantially more painful and awkward to use (like @ in the “agents” window being completely unable to find a file because it’s some sort of “global” scope).
One thing that surprises me about this whole segment is that JetBrains haven’t eaten these folks lunch. Their IDEs are leagues better than VSCode but their AI integration is awful by comparison (and the bar is low). I can’t even see how much of the context window I have left.
[1] it’s insane I have to answer questions in a tiny input box I cannot resize or adjust the size of. Let alone the fact the text area I input prompts into cannot be resized. Truly feels like the UI/UX is done by people without any experience.
I gave up, canceled my plan, and went back to boring old VSCode. It feels so much more stable, and my Mac no longer runs out of memory. With cursor I had to reboot my macbook several times a week and had to always be plugged in.
That's me with Google Antigravity. Switching back to vscode was such a breath of fresh air. Porting over my (extensive) settings/extensions/keyboard shortcuts was extremely easy too (just ask the agent to do it), and now I can use both Copilot models and Claude Code easily. More to your point though, the speed and stability is incomparable. I can't remember having many issues with Cursor last year when I used it at my last job, but still, vscode has been surprisingly pleasant for agentic use.
One of the things I've came to appreciate about the cli tools like Codex or Claude is that the interface is so limited that every feature they release is still limited and constrained to the same UX limitations, whereas those "funkier" IDEs change from month to month giving me further fatigue.
I try it from time to time and feel the same way. Some people I know really like it but I can’t tell if that’s because it’s good or just because it’s what they’ve become familiar with and they don’t like to change tools. Cursor had a good head start and a lot of early PR.
I agree. I quit cursor and replaced it with conductor and a mix of Claude Code / Codex/ Copilot and i dont miss it as such. Maybe one day I will come back.
Tried that, it just seemed way dumber this way unfortunately. And the zed UI provided 0 visibility whenever it was doing tool calls, and for some reason it kept running sleep 30 calls because it couldn’t figure out how to see the results of its own tool calls for some reason.
