As someone put in the unfortunate position of building an AI IDE in three weeks, I assure you it's much more difficult than it seems. Sure, we were able to get something working with all the features you would expect, but the performance was awful. Claude Code, Cursor, and others do a lot of tweaking based on a lot of experience in order to make their systems give good results. There is more to getting good results than just using a good model.
Decent analogy in 2nd sentence BUT the 1st doesn't hold water. TIMTOWTDI, statements about "everyone" or "no one" are highly suspect, and the trend of code-assist -> agentic -> delegated / orchestration is just that (a trend), not a universal law. Even in a full-on maximalist yolo paperclip future, many experts will likely ALWAYS want access to a decent IDE. (Note I'm not saying Cursor is necessarily that IDE, and I'm not commenting on the valuation.)
OK, I'll concede that not everyone keeps getting pulled back to vim, the way I do. I simply don't like VS Code or its forks. I like Zed well enough, but I find I use it very rarely...two or three terminal tabs (Claude code, bash, and vim) is usually all I need, or tmux windows and/or panes if I'm working remotely, with Claude Code opened locally and configured to use tmux to talk to the remote system (using a wrapper I made to automate the setup: https://github.com/swelljoe/tandem).
But, even if you want a big all-in-one editor in an Electron app, it seems obvious VS Code is the way to go (or Zed, if you you aren't committed to using an Electron app). I just can't think of anything Cursor offers that makes it worth spending extra money for it.
