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.
Still curious which ones will survive when the AI gold diggers finally settle.
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.
Software development is changing, and so is Cursor.
In the last year, we moved from manually editing files to working with agents that write most of our code. How we create software will continue to evolve as we enter the third era of software development, where fleets of agents work autonomously to ship improvements.
We're building toward this future, but there is a lot of work left to make it happen. Engineers are still micromanaging individual agents, trying to keep track of different conversations, and jumping between multiple terminals, tools, and windows.
We're introducing Cursor 3, a unified workspace for building software with agents. The new Cursor interface brings clarity to the work agents produce, pulling you up to a higher level of abstraction, with the ability to dig deeper when you want. It's faster, cleaner, and more powerful, with a multi-repo layout, seamless handoff between local and cloud agents, and the option to switch back to the Cursor IDE at any time.
When we started building Cursor, we forked VS Code instead of building an extension so we could shape our own surface. With Cursor 3, we took that a step further by building this new interface from scratch, centered around agents.
The new interface is inherently multi-workspace, allowing humans and agents to work across different repos.
Working with agents is now much easier. All local and cloud agents appear in the sidebar, including the ones you kick off from mobile, web, desktop, Slack, GitHub, and Linear.
Cloud agents produce demos and screenshots of their work for you to verify. This is the same experience you get at cursor.com/agents, now integrated into the desktop app.
We made moving agents between environments really fast.
Move an agent session from cloud to local when you want to make edits and test it on your own desktop. Composer 2, our own frontier coding model with high usage limits, is great for iterating quickly.
In the reverse direction, you can move an agent session from local to cloud to keep it running while you're offline, or so that you can move on to the next task. This is especially useful for longer-running tasks that would otherwise get interrupted when you close your laptop.
The new diffs view allows you to edit and review changes faster with a simpler UI. When you're ready, you can stage, commit, and manage PRs.
Alpha users told us that a lot of what they like about Cursor 3 is the way it combines the best parts of the IDE with more recent capabilities we've shipped in an agent-first interface.
Dive deeper anytime by viewing files, and go to definition in the editor with full LSPs.
Cursor can use the built-in browser to open, navigate, and prompt against local websites.
Browse hundreds of plugins that extend agents with MCPs, skills, subagents, and more. Install with one click, or set up your own team marketplace of private plugins.
With Cursor 3, we have the foundational pieces in place—model, product, and runtime—to build more autonomous agents and better collaboration across teams. We will also continue to invest in the IDE until codebases are self-driving.
This won't be the last time the interface for building software changes. More powerful coding models will unlock new interaction patterns. We are excited to continue to build, simplify, and transform Cursor to be the best way to code with AI.
Upgrade Cursor, and type Cmd+Shift+P -> Agents Window to try the new interface. Or learn more in our docs.
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.
I get the temptation of letting agents do everything. But they create really bad systems still (bad architecture, reimplementation of solved problems etc).
I also get the temptation for beginners and think it’s great that more people are empowered to build software but moving entirely to chat means they won’t learn and level up which in the long run limits their ability.
I could be wrong. And my way of thinking is dying but thankfully I can build the tool I want.
Is "Cursor 3" == Glass? I get they feel like their identity means they need to constantly be pushing the envelope in terms of agent UX. But they could stand to have like an "experimental" track and a "This is VS Code but with better AI integration" track.
What's the pitch for using Cursor now a days?
But are they affordable already for developers who don't earn a Silicon Valley salary? Developers in 3rd world countries?
For $20 a month, I can plan and implement thousands of features using Composer 2 or Auto with Cursor. The usage limits are insanely higher. Yes, the depth of understanding is not Opus 4.6, but most work doesn't need that. And the work that does need it I pass to Claude.
I can code 8 hours a day using LLMs as my primary driver spending just $40 a month.
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!
Now we have 3 ways of coding:
* vim / emacs - full manual
* VSCode / IntelliJ - semi-automatic
* ClaudeCode/Codex/OpenCode/... - fully automated
Cursor can't stay in between
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).
It's a very tough spot they're in. They have a great product in the code-first philosophy, but it may turn out it's too small a market where the margins will just be competed away to zero by open source, leaving only opportunity for the first-party model companies essentially.
They've obviously had a go at being a first-party model company to address this, but that didn't work.
I think the next best chance they see is going in the vibe-first direction and trying to claim a segment of that market, which they're obviously betting could be significantly bigger. It's faster changing and (a bit) newer and so the scope of opportunity is more unknown. There's maybe more chances to carve out success there, though honestly I think the likeliest outcome is it just ends up the same way.
Since the beginning people have been saying that Cursor only had a certain window of time to capitalise on. While everyone was scrambling to figure out how to build tools to take advantage of AI in coding, they were one of the fastest and best and made a superb product that has been hugely influential. But this might be what it looks like to see that window starting to close for them.
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.
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.
And I would happily pay a seat based subscription fee or usage fees for cloud agents etc on top of this
Unfortunately very locked into these heavily subsidized subscription plans right now but I think from a product design and vision standpoint you guys are doing the best work in this space right now
Your workflow is probably closer to what most SWEs are actually doing.
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.
That's basically it. You can review changes afterwards, but that's not the main point of Claude Code. It's a different workflow. It's built on the premise: given a tight and verifiable plan, AI will execute the actual coding correctly. This will work, mostly, if you use the very best models with a very good and very specific harness.
Cursor, same as Copilot, has been used by people who are basically pair programming with the AI. So, on abstraction down.
I have no idea what is better, or faster. I suspect it depends at least on the problem, the AI, and the person.
I thought it was primarily a user of Anthropic and OpenAI APIs, so the fewer tokens you use to accomplish a task, the higher their margin.
I dont think there is an inbetween. Its really hard to 'keep an eye' on code by casually reading diffs. Eventually it will become vibe coding.
Software engineers are deluding themselves with spec driven, plans, prds whatever nonsense and thinking its not vibecoding.
> 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).
I applaud Cursor for experimenting with design, and seeing if there are better ways of collaborating with agents using a different type of workspace. But at the moment, it's hard to even justify the time spent kicking the tires on something new, closed source and paid.
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.
And management everywhere is convinced that thats what they are paying for. My company is replacing job titles with "builder". Apparently these tools will make builder out of paper pushers hiding in corporate beaurcarcy. I am suddenly same as them now per my company managment.
Sometimes u need the beef of opus but 80% composer is plenty.
I thought there was an entire initiative to build their own coding model and the fine tunes of in Composer 1.5 and Composer 2 were just buying them time and training data
I haven't used it in a decade, Im sure it has has evolved
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.
You just add this to your ~/.claude/settings.json:
{
"env": {
"DISABLE_AUTOUPDATER": "1",
"ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL": "https://api.minimax.io/anthropic",
"ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN": "YOUR_SECRET_KEY",
"API_TIMEOUT_MS": "3000000",
"CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC": 1,
"ANTHROPIC_MODEL": "MiniMax-M2.7-highspeed",
"ANTHROPIC_SMALL_FAST_MODEL": "MiniMax-M2.7-highspeed",
"ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL": "MiniMax-M2.7-highspeed",
"ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL": "MiniMax-M2.7-highspeed",
"ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL": "MiniMax-M2.7-highspeed"
}
}Can’t say I miss eclipse, but a lot of the VSCode extensions seems to utilize old legacy eclipse stuff and has the bugs to match.
If not you really should. IntelliJ with Java is one of the best dev experiences I've ever had. I'm a VSCode fan for most other things but for Java I wouldn't even remotely consider using it over IntelliJ if I had the option :-)
Every company I've worked at has still had a few engineers who insist on working exclusively in the CLI with vim/emacs prior to AI. Every other engineer used some flavor of a desktop app ranging from more minimal editors to incredibly complex IDEs. I expect we land back on UIs long term.