Cursor vs. Claude Code - Which is the Best AI Coding Agent?

Video Description

Cursor Agent and Claude Code dropped within a week of each other. I wanted to find out which coding agent was better. So I gave them each three tasks on a non-trivial web app running in production and ranked each agent on UX, Code Quality, Cost, Autonomy, and Tests & Version Control. tldw: I preferred Claude's CLI based UX. I found Cursor's Agent controls a bit clunky -- it wasn't always clear where and when I needed to click. For as much agency as I was giving to the agent, I also didn't feel like I needed 2/3 of the screen taken up by a file editor. A full-blown IDE might be overwrought as agents get good. Both agents were powered by Claude 3.7 Sonnet, so a lot of the line-level code quality was the same. Claude Code had a more wholistic understanding of my codebase, but Cursor's ability to search the web for documentation got it out of some jams. Claude Code's metered pricing can get expensive! I racked up about $8 dollars during ~90 minutes of hands on keyboard. Not a lot relative to software development costs, but not-trivial at scale either. Cursor's includes a lot of Agent use with its $20/month subscription, and my rough estimation clocks Cursor Agent at 4-5x cheaper than Claude Code (probably because Cursor is using less context of your codebase). For developers already paying for Cursor, it'll be interesting to see if they're willing to pay extra for Claude Code. Claude Code gains your trust through iterative permission granting. Cursor Agent has two modes: approve every change, or YOLO mode. By the end of my session with Claude Code, I was letting it do almost everything, because it had earned the right incrementally. I never was brave enough to click YOLO button on Cursor, so my development experience felt like button mashing. Claude Code worked better with my test suite, and I'm embracing tests more as I let LLMs write more of my code. Claude Code also wrote the prettiest commit messages I've ever pushed to git. In the end, I preferred the experience of working with Claude Code, but I won't be giving up my AI powered IDE any time soon, and I imagine the Cursor team will be rapidly improving on the developer experience. The bigger picture here: both agents successfully accomplished the tasks I gave them and got me unstuck on an abandoned project. I sort of can't believe we're here. I've been bullish on LLMs for code for a couple years, but I've long thought that a Human in the Loop is what made LLM powered coding viable. This experiment changed my mind. The agents were far from perfect, and my tasks and codebase are less complex than what developers often do at work, but to me, the trajectory is clear. This is where software development is headed. If you're a developer, even if you're skeptical, especially if you're skeptical, you owe it to yourself to at least spend a weekend working with these tools on a side project.