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What's the benefit of this compared to the IDE? To be more like Claude Code?
Flip your thinking around for a second and consider why an IDE is required for an agent that codes for you?

The IDE/editor is for me, the agent doesn't need it. That also means I am not forced to used whatever imperfect forked IDE the agent is implemented against.

So you can use an IDE other than VS code.
Actually, I think where Claude Code shines, is with the VSCode Extension. It's a great mix between a CLI that could be used in a bash script for automation, as well as a coding assistant.

I haven't found however if Cursor cli provides this kind of extension

Holy moly. I did not see that coming, but it makes sense. I’m enjoying the terminal-based coding agents way more than I ever would have expected. I can keep one spinning in the background while I do #dayjob, and as a bonus I feel like a haX0r.

2025 is the year of the terminal, apparently?

For my prototype purposes, it’s great, and Claude code the most fun I’ve had with tech in a jillion years.

That's funny. I was really hoping that Anthropic would make a "Claude GUI".
In one of their Claude Code talks they said it didn’t seem worth it, given their expectation that all IDEs will become obsolete by next year.
Isn't that Claude Desktop?
If I'm not mistaken, it may be feasible to build one with the Claude Code sdk
At this point, there are more AI coding agents announced every week than Javascript frameworks, but to be honest, I'm here for it.
Think how many JavaScript frameworks can be vibe coded now!
Think how much training has been done on such Javascript frameworks... no one stops wondering what the outcome would be. The only fact that when I ask to create an app, without any further detail about what to use, and it defaults on React, imo it's a total failure whatever the agent
This made me chuckle. Excellent comparison. I share your sentiment; it’s more exciting than distracting.
The joke's tired now bro. It hasn't been true for a good 5-7 years now.
seems pretty basic. I don't see anything unique here. I am happy with my Gemini CLI.
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Claude Code but can use GPT-5 built in. Not a bad selling point
I wonder if this will support directly interfacing with OpenAI's APIs vs. going through Cursor's APIs (and billing).
They are all clones of gemini cli at this point?
Wouldn't be better to just use the Warp AI solution at this point?
is there a way to get it to display more information? its stuck not doing anything and i cant tell if that's because it timed out or it is running a script or it is thinking or what is even happening. sometimes it just does things without even giving any feedback at all. i dont know what it is thinking or what it is trying to do and i cant really see the output of the terminal commands it is running. it just pauses every once in a while and asks to run a command.

is there a way to make it more verbose?

Fascinating to see how agents are redefining what IDEs are. This was not really the case in the chat AI era. But as autonomy increases, the traditional IDE UI becomes less important form of interaction. I think those CLI tools have pretty good chance to create a new dev tools ecosystem. Creating a full featured language plugin (let alone a full IDE) for VSCode or Intellij is not for a faint-hearted, and cross IDE portability is limited. CLI tools + MCP can be a lot simpler, more composable and more portable.
Hopefully this one is as good as Claude code. None of them that I've tried have come close yet.
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My first thought was, "meh, I already have Claude Code". But then I remembered my primary frustration with Claude Code. I need other LLMs to be able to validate Claude Code's assumptions and work. I need to do this in an automated way. Before Cursor CLI, I did not have a way to programmatically ask Cursor do this. It was very manual, very painful. But, now I can create a Claude Code agent that is a "cursor-specialist" that uses cursor cli to do all of that in an automated way.
They realized that CLI is the much better interface for these kinds of tasks.
I don't think this is why. I listened to a recent podcast with Michael Truell and he made clear they think the TUI is an inferior form factor. This feels more like a reactionary move than a visionary one.
With all the frontier labs competing in this space now, and them letting you use your consumer subscription through the CLI, I don’t understand how the Cursor products will survive. Why pay an extra $X/mo when I can get this functionality included in the $Y/mo I’m already paying OAI/Anthropic/GOOG?
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It seems they haven’t implemented MCP client features in Cursor CLI yet
Does it work with local LLMs like through Ollama or llama.cpp?
Seriously Cursor. You can’t just write wrappers all your life. VSCode wrapper and now Gemini CLI wrapper. Can you make something from scratch for once? It’s as if they want an exit and they’re putting in minimum effort until that materializes.
Could anyone compare this with Claude Code and aider?