I use Cursor every day. I also use Claude Code every day. They're not competing for the same job, and figuring that out is what made both of them finally useful.
Cursor is where I write. It's tight, visual, and the diff-in-editor feedback loop is hard to beat for anything under ~500 lines of change. Claude Code is where I think. It's a terminal, it has a longer attention span, and it doesn't mind chewing on a repo for five minutes while I grab coffee.
When I switch from Cursor to Claude Code
My mental switch is roughly: if I can see the whole change on one screen, I stay in Cursor. The moment a task sprawls - across files, across concepts, or across time - I move to Claude Code.
Three tasks it owns in my workflow:
1. Large refactors. Renaming a domain concept across a SaaS codebase, replacing an entire auth provider, migrating a feature from REST to tRPC. These are the jobs where Cursor's "give me the diff" flow fights you because the diff is 40 files long.
2. Codebase Q&A. When onboarding to a new project or returning to one after months away, Claude Code is a better explainer than a README. "Walk me through how a request flows from the Chrome extension popup to the Xano backend" saves me twenty minutes of spelunking.
3. Git babysitting. Resolving merge conflicts, writing PR descriptions that match the actual diff, triaging CI failures. Boring, interruption-heavy work that Claude Code absorbs well because it can read files, run commands, and keep state across a long session.
The CLAUDE.md pattern that pays off
The single best change to my workflow was committing a CLAUDE.md at the repo root. Not rules - context. The stuff a new engineer would want in their first hour.
md# Project context - Monorepo: /web (Next.js), /extension (Chrome MV3), /api (Xano) - Auth: Supabase on web, message-passed into extension - Env vars live in Doppler; never hardcode secrets - Primary deploy: Vercel for /web, web store for /extension - Local: pnpm dev runs web only; extension is loaded unpacked
Ten lines. Claude Code picks it up on every session and stops asking me what stack I'm on. Combined with Cursor's own rules, I almost never start a chat by re-explaining the project.
What still trips it up
Claude Code is not a magic coworker. A few honest limits after months of daily use:
- Long-running servers. It can start them, it can't "watch" them the way a human would. I still pair the CLI with a real terminal for dev servers.
- Interactive debugging. Step-through debuggers and browser DevTools are still mine. Claude Code is great at reasoning about logs but bad at being inside a paused runtime.
- UI polish. Pixel-level tweaks are faster in Cursor with the file open. Asking Claude Code to nudge padding is overkill.
- Anything with a tight feedback loop. If iteration speed matters more than reasoning depth, I'm back in Cursor.
A coworker, not a faster autocomplete
The framing that clicked for me: Cursor is a better keyboard, Claude Code is a better coworker. One makes me type faster. The other lets me hand off the kind of work I'd previously hesitate to even start because the setup cost was too high.
Refactors I used to dread are now a twenty-minute conversation. Onboarding to an unfamiliar module takes a ten-line prompt instead of half a day. The wins aren't in raw speed - they're in which tasks are now worth doing at all.
That's the real upgrade. Not faster code. A bigger surface area of work I'm willing to take on.