Developers today have an unprecedented choice of AI coding assistants, and two standout options are Claude Code and Cursor.
Both tools aim to accelerate software development with AI, but they differ significantly in vision, workflow, and features. This newsletter has a ton of content showing you how to build incredible software with both tools, but we’ve never quite compared them side by side.
This comparison will dig into Claude Code vs Cursor, highlighting how each works, their key capabilities, and when to choose one over the other. You’ll also see how you can use each tool to add a feature to a production application, so you can get a feel for which is best-suited for you.
What is Claude Code?
Claude Code is Anthropic’s AI-powered coding tool that operates entirely in the terminal. It’s described as an “agentic coding assistant” living in your CLI, capable of understanding your whole codebase and performing coding tasks via natural language commands. It’s geared quite heavily towards software engineers, though many less-technical folks are loving the tool.
In practice, you can open a project directory and simply type claude to start instructing it. There’s no GUI. Claude Code meets you in the shell where you already work.
It will make plans, write or modify code across files, run tests, and even commit changes based on high-level instructions.
Anthropic’s powerful Claude models like Opus 4.5 are usually on the bleeding edge of benchmarks that measure AI’s competence at writing software. So you should feel comfortable that they drive the tool, giving it a huge context window (up to 200K tokens or more on some plans) and strong reasoning ability. In Cursor, you’ll have the same context window and reasoning, so this isn’t unique to the Claude Code harness.
Claude Code acts like an autonomous coding agent in your terminal. There’s no emphasis on writing code yourself. You describe what you want, and it takes the wheel to implement it.
What is Cursor?
Cursor, on the other hand, is both a coding agent and an editor. It’s based on the familiar VS Code interface, so it will feel very familiar if you’re already a VS Code user.
Think of Cursor as a specialized code editor with AI built in at its core. It presents a full GUI environment with a file tree, code editor, etc. It’s just like a standard lightweight IDE, but enriched with AI chat and autocomplete features.
Cursor lets you write code normally while offering inline code generation, intelligent autocompletion, and a full coding agent you can take advantage of.
The Cursor agent also has super interesting custom harnessing around whatever model choice you make, like indexing your entire codebase to do semantic searches.
It can answer questions about your codebase, suggest refactors, and even handle multi-file edits via an agent mode, all without leaving the editor. Cursor integrates with developer workflows through features like “Cursor Rules” (to inject project-specific context), a Slack bot, and a GitHub PR reviewer called Bugbot.
It supports various AI models (OpenAI GPT-4/GPT-5, Anthropic Claude, etc.) behind the scenes, but wraps them in a polished IDE experience. In essence, Cursor serves as “The AI Code Editor”. It’s an environment where AI assists you at every step, but you remain in control of the coding process.
Building a feature in Claude Code
Claude Code is a great tool for building. For example, we have a Deep Work Timer application that needs a new feature.
Subscribers to the newsletter have already seen a detailed guide on how we used Claude Code to add a feature to this app, but we’ll cover it in brief here.
Good sessions in Claude Code start out in Plan mode. In Plan mode, you can describe the end state of what you want to Claude in plain English.
Right now, users can see their activity over the last week. I want them to also have the option to see their activity just for the current day. Make the day view the default, with a neat option that fits in with the design to toggle this to the week view. Plan this out, ultrathink, and use the frontend-design skill.Claude will do some initial reasoning, index your codebase (if it hasn’t already), and then ask some back-and-forth clarifying questions about the feature if anything isn’t clear.
When it thinks it has enough info, it’ll present you the plan and ask for permission to kick off implementation.
When you let it, it will implement the code needed, testing things as it goes.