6 ms·

Yep in my experience the weakest engs in my org are the ones still using Cursor. not a good outlook IMO

Jcampuzano2 3mo ago
I know this is not always true. But the same people who like cursor still are the same people who are less familiar with the terminal. And I don't know what it is but it feels the less familiar you are with a terminal, the less skilled you tend to be. Definitely not a 100% case. But has been common in my experience
- yoyohello13 3mo ago
  I think it's more of a sign of a good engineer. I know a number of engineers that are good and don't really work with the terminal. On the other hand, every engineer I've worked with who was a 'terminal guy' was great. I think being good with the terminal is a signal that the person is willing to 'dig in' and understand stuff at a lower level.
  - gogasca 3mo ago
    [dead]
  - weatherlite 3mo ago
    > I think being good with the terminal is a signal that the person is willing to 'dig in' and understand stuff at a lower level. You know what else is a good sign of them willing to dig in and understand stuff at a lower level ? If they dig in and understan stuff at a lower level. Let's judge people on what matters - the actual work and value they bring. Not status symbols like their IDE of choice or how fast they type into the keyboard.
    - yoyohello13 3mo ago
      Yes, that's why I said 'signal' and not 'sole metric used to determine worth'. Devs get so touchy about this subject. I didn't say being good with the terminal is all that matters, it's just an extra piece of information.
      - weatherlite 3mo ago
        yeah its not a good piece of information but you do you
- anthonypasq 3mo ago
  why do annoying engineers has such a weird fetish/superiority complex about the terminal. Its an inherently inferior UI. Theres absolutely nothing you can do in a terminal that you cant do in a GUI, and every TUI is just jumping through insane hoops to support functionality thats trivial in a GUI. And guess what, you can just open a terminal in cursor! who knew!? Why on earth would you want to look at a code diff in a terminal? Why on earth would you want to use weird bespoke keyboard shortcuts to navigate sub-agents in a TUI session. can someone please explain this to me?
  - robocat 3mo ago
    What's a polite way to suggest you ask AI first? Why should others spend their valuable time helping you? Especially when you insult the people you want to answer you "fetish/superiority complex" just demonstrates your own prejudice. Personally I ask AI for a summary of positions, and prompt to provide some good articles on a subject - ideally articles from supporters of either side.
    - anthonypasq 3mo ago
      id prefer a human to explain it to me
      - nwienert 3mo ago
        I actually was a Cursor advocate / CC hater (go back in my comment history), and now I use only TUI coding harnesses. To start a big part is just the efficacy of them, which comes down to the model and the harness logic itself. CC is good, it's sub-agents, loops, background jobs / agents, skills/hooks/etc have typically been pretty far ahead though others are constantly catching up. But you're sort of missing something. I use iTerm, so to me it's not the TUI itself, it's iTerm. And while it's imperfect, what I get is this: I can open and close sessions nearly instantly and tile and window and tab them as flexibly as I want, plus it's a system I'm familiar with in terms of shortcuts etc. Has my configured theme, fonts, etc all set up. Every GUI app is different, every TUI app has half of the UI already incredibly familiar to me, it's not "just text", it's iTerm. That also means they all are the same - I run Codex and Claude and pi side by side, and i switch between them with no overhead and minimal mental model shift. Sure, different harness does suck but that's the same issue with GUI just with an additional new layer to learn. Smaller thing is because it's all text, there's no limits on my ability to copy things out. And it's a really fast text renderer that can render tens of thousands of rows efficiently. Many GUIs have various dialogs, unselectable areas, virtualization, or just slow past a point. I trust my terminal scales. Just a few reasons.
- anthonypasq 3mo ago
  why do annoying engineers have such a weird fetish/superiority complex about the terminal. Its an inherently inferior UI. Theres absolutely nothing you can do in a terminal that you cant do in a GUI, and every TUI is just jumping through insane hoops to support functionality thats trivial in a GUI. Why on earth would you want to look at a code diff in a terminal? Why on earth would you want to use weird bespoke keyboard shortcuts to navigate sub-agents in a TUI session. Why on earth would i not want the ability to open/edit a file manually in the tool im using to write code. can someone please explain this to me?
  - ok_dad 3mo ago
    Different strokes for different folks, but unfortunately they take their opinions and preferences as a sign that others are inferior.
    - digitaltrees 3mo ago
      Yah this judgment and arrogance is so annoying in tech. And worse it stops us from learning. Some of the best lessons of my career were when a new developer asked a question often taken for granted or we implemented a design pattern to make coding more approachable.
  - ErikBjare 3mo ago
    I refuse to believe this wasn't written to intentionally bait, reads like copypasta.
  - ghshephard 3mo ago
    As someone who has spent the last 10+ years working in Tmux - but is entirely comfortable on Mac, Windows and Linux desktop environments - here are the key reasons why the terminal experience is superior for me. - I work a lot with data - and streaming data through text tools is twitch fast. If someone has a question about data - before anybody else can log in to their superset, or analytics database, and try and work through the SQL queries or charts to get the answer - I've already jammed the data through awk and got an answer. - As an SRE - I work with a lot of systems that have pretty rich APIs - so being able to send a request, get the answer back in json, dump it into jq, select the parts I care about - maybe -c to compress it and ripgrep a subset out - is just fast. - I work in a lot of contexts with a lot of different systems, datacenters, applications - tmux lets me keep all of them cleanly organized in a separate windows and subpanes. I'll have 15-20 windows open per week, and maybe a 5-6 panes in each- keeping 100+ different contexts (and scroll backs, bash history) - all nicely organized is really useful. - I'm also a systems guy - and there is no other way to dig into a system but the terminal - netstat, ps, dmesg, /proc - these are all components that have only one credible path to investigation and discovery. If you aren't super comfortable in the terminal - zero way to learn about this stuff. - Working remotely - means ssh. So - once again - terminal. The Focus on the terminal is that it's the best tool (and in some cases the only tool) for so many of these tasks - and by performing these tasks a lot - you learn about systems - so the people who spend a lot of time in the terminal tend to know a lot more about systems than people who don't.
- digitaltrees 3mo ago
  Totally disagree. I find people still using cursor or other IDE centric flows want to review the code and be more interactive. Claude Code and Codex push agent autonomy and speed. Sorry but they go off the rails too much.
  - ozim 3mo ago
    I am pissed off by people calling Cursor an IDE. VSCode it is based on is text editor. AI features are great but it is not IDE.
    - throwaway7783 3mo ago
      This. I hate VSCode as an IDE and is the reason why I have not used Cursor. I wish Jetbrains actually had some brains to build a better coding agent inside their IDEs (which I think are one of the best out there), but for now Im stuck with codex/cc + Jetbrains IDE
    - digitaltrees 3mo ago
      What do you define as an IDE then? I think something with an integrated terminal, file system and git UI is the essential set for most development.
      - waterTanuki 3mo ago
        IDE ships it's own compiler, debugger, usually some sort of container/container orchestrator and database tool. I.e. the things that separate hobby projects from production ones. VSCode has these things but they're extensions, not build into the editor
        simondotau 3mo ago
        So long as I can do those things within the editor, it is an IDE in every respect other than pedantry.
        3mo ago
- Pxtl 3mo ago
  Honestly the TUI in most of these coding agents is so fancy I have trouble thinking of them as "terminal". I use Pi Coding Agent and the fact that it's terminal means it's easy to run inside something properly sandboxed in a YOLO mode using normal bash commands instead of relying on individually sandboxed tools. Once I got the tmux settings for proper scrolling and whatnot it feels fine. Honestly the TUI of tmux is the one that really enrages me - so much complexity for just "I want to switch terminals on my remote".
  - fwip 3mo ago
    Zellij is a pretty good tmux alternative, with a UI that feels a lot friendlier.
    - ghshephard 3mo ago
      With the one caveat that it does not (yet) support copy/paste buffers or copying from the scroll back buffer. It’s also adamant that you use a mouse to select/copy - anything more complex and you need to pipe everything into neovim (or whatever text editor you use) and do your work there. I love zellij - it feels like the future - but hard to give up keyboard based select/copy and pulling from my scrollback.
- dropofwill 3mo ago
  Cursor has a terminal based app that’s just as good as any of the other mainstream ones…
  - Jcampuzano2 3mo ago
    I know, I actually use it pretty often at work. I agree that its pretty on par with the others.
  - 01100011 3mo ago
    Does it have a plugin library as extensive as Codex? I've started to leverage the plugin ecosystem to fuse data from chat history, wikis, emails, etc.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- discreteevent 3mo ago
  Someone instructing AI through the terminal is a bit like an office worker with a tool belt. I don't think you can say anything about their coding ability until they are coding without AI. Even if thats in notepad.
  - democracy 3mo ago
    Touche )))
  - Jcampuzano2 3mo ago
    I actually never mentioned anything about actually using the AI tools integrated into Cursor in my post. I think I'd generalize my post more to say the more often somebody reaches for the terminal, in my anecdotal experience the more proficient they tend to be.
    - cyclopeanutopia 3mo ago
      Proficient in what, terminal use? :) Shocking!
- ryanjshaw 3mo ago
  I taught myself assembly language from a book on a 286, I cracked games with SoftICE as a teenager, tried out every Linux distribution in the 90s, and have been developing software professionally for 2 decades. I prefer Cursor. Am I an outlier or do you just judge people for weird reasons? I’ve never seen an IDE person judge a terminal person, it’s always the other way around - what’s up with that?
  - Jcampuzano2 3mo ago
    Never said I was judging, just making an observation. And to answer - yes by book you would be an outlier. Its just an anecdotal experience.
  - scubbo 3mo ago
    > Definitely not a 100% case.
  - rvba 3mo ago
    Did you win the Putnam? If not, then don't be bolder than this guy
- anon7000 3mo ago
  I’m very comfortable with the terminal, but let’s be honest. It’s not very good at certain apps. For example, copy/pasting long bits of code or strings into and out of Claude code is highly annoying. Line breaks in weird spots, because of the terminal, for example. Anyways, I use cursor for a number of reasons: 1. I still want very quick access to the code in the editor. So I want the IDE. 2. Generally solid defaults. Auto-compaction, plan mode, etc, all work pretty well. 3. When I switched back to it from Claude code, it was genuinely faster at running Opus than Claude code. Claude code was grinding to a fucking halt every two minutes. 4. So annoying to search and view your chat history in Claude code. I’m a visual person. I also want all my repos loaded into a big workspace. Cursor also does that great out of the box. 5. I don’t have time to redo my terminal setup again to optimize it for Claude. Tbh, I’m not aware of much that Claude code does that you can’t also do in cursor. At the end of the day, the agent loop and tools are not that different, and the model is identical. The tool you use to prompt it is not the hard part. I just work faster when I have everything easily accessible in one spot, which was easier for me to accomplish with cursor than Claude. I found it just got out of my way.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
jwilber 3mo ago
I don’t think mapping tooling to ability makes sense here, particularly when the “advanced” tools here just abstract more away, though I agree that Cursor is terrible. So many useless windows.
mrits 3mo ago
I hate to be the one to break it to you but the weakest engineers are going to be producing just as much value
digitaltrees 3mo ago
Opposite. The weakest engineers trust CC or codex, stopped reviewing the code and push slop PRs. Those still acting in the loop move faster with better architecture and coding patterns and aren't losing their skills.
interestpiqued 3mo ago
You must be a joy to work with.

I know this is not always true. But the same people who like cursor still are the same people who are less familiar with the terminal. And I don't know what it is but it feels the less familiar you are with a terminal, the less skilled you tend to be. Definitely not a 100% case. But has been common in my experience

yoyohello13 3mo ago
I think it's more of a sign of a good engineer. I know a number of engineers that are good and don't really work with the terminal. On the other hand, every engineer I've worked with who was a 'terminal guy' was great. I think being good with the terminal is a signal that the person is willing to 'dig in' and understand stuff at a lower level.
- gogasca 3mo ago
  [dead]
- weatherlite 3mo ago
  > I think being good with the terminal is a signal that the person is willing to 'dig in' and understand stuff at a lower level. You know what else is a good sign of them willing to dig in and understand stuff at a lower level ? If they dig in and understan stuff at a lower level. Let's judge people on what matters - the actual work and value they bring. Not status symbols like their IDE of choice or how fast they type into the keyboard.
  - yoyohello13 3mo ago
    Yes, that's why I said 'signal' and not 'sole metric used to determine worth'. Devs get so touchy about this subject. I didn't say being good with the terminal is all that matters, it's just an extra piece of information.
    - weatherlite 3mo ago
      yeah its not a good piece of information but you do you
anthonypasq 3mo ago
why do annoying engineers has such a weird fetish/superiority complex about the terminal. Its an inherently inferior UI. Theres absolutely nothing you can do in a terminal that you cant do in a GUI, and every TUI is just jumping through insane hoops to support functionality thats trivial in a GUI. And guess what, you can just open a terminal in cursor! who knew!? Why on earth would you want to look at a code diff in a terminal? Why on earth would you want to use weird bespoke keyboard shortcuts to navigate sub-agents in a TUI session. can someone please explain this to me?
- robocat 3mo ago
  What's a polite way to suggest you ask AI first? Why should others spend their valuable time helping you? Especially when you insult the people you want to answer you "fetish/superiority complex" just demonstrates your own prejudice. Personally I ask AI for a summary of positions, and prompt to provide some good articles on a subject - ideally articles from supporters of either side.
  - anthonypasq 3mo ago
    id prefer a human to explain it to me
    - nwienert 3mo ago
      I actually was a Cursor advocate / CC hater (go back in my comment history), and now I use only TUI coding harnesses. To start a big part is just the efficacy of them, which comes down to the model and the harness logic itself. CC is good, it's sub-agents, loops, background jobs / agents, skills/hooks/etc have typically been pretty far ahead though others are constantly catching up. But you're sort of missing something. I use iTerm, so to me it's not the TUI itself, it's iTerm. And while it's imperfect, what I get is this: I can open and close sessions nearly instantly and tile and window and tab them as flexibly as I want, plus it's a system I'm familiar with in terms of shortcuts etc. Has my configured theme, fonts, etc all set up. Every GUI app is different, every TUI app has half of the UI already incredibly familiar to me, it's not "just text", it's iTerm. That also means they all are the same - I run Codex and Claude and pi side by side, and i switch between them with no overhead and minimal mental model shift. Sure, different harness does suck but that's the same issue with GUI just with an additional new layer to learn. Smaller thing is because it's all text, there's no limits on my ability to copy things out. And it's a really fast text renderer that can render tens of thousands of rows efficiently. Many GUIs have various dialogs, unselectable areas, virtualization, or just slow past a point. I trust my terminal scales. Just a few reasons.
anthonypasq 3mo ago
why do annoying engineers have such a weird fetish/superiority complex about the terminal. Its an inherently inferior UI. Theres absolutely nothing you can do in a terminal that you cant do in a GUI, and every TUI is just jumping through insane hoops to support functionality thats trivial in a GUI. Why on earth would you want to look at a code diff in a terminal? Why on earth would you want to use weird bespoke keyboard shortcuts to navigate sub-agents in a TUI session. Why on earth would i not want the ability to open/edit a file manually in the tool im using to write code. can someone please explain this to me?
- ok_dad 3mo ago
  Different strokes for different folks, but unfortunately they take their opinions and preferences as a sign that others are inferior.
  - digitaltrees 3mo ago
    Yah this judgment and arrogance is so annoying in tech. And worse it stops us from learning. Some of the best lessons of my career were when a new developer asked a question often taken for granted or we implemented a design pattern to make coding more approachable.
- ErikBjare 3mo ago
  I refuse to believe this wasn't written to intentionally bait, reads like copypasta.
- ghshephard 3mo ago
  As someone who has spent the last 10+ years working in Tmux - but is entirely comfortable on Mac, Windows and Linux desktop environments - here are the key reasons why the terminal experience is superior for me. - I work a lot with data - and streaming data through text tools is twitch fast. If someone has a question about data - before anybody else can log in to their superset, or analytics database, and try and work through the SQL queries or charts to get the answer - I've already jammed the data through awk and got an answer. - As an SRE - I work with a lot of systems that have pretty rich APIs - so being able to send a request, get the answer back in json, dump it into jq, select the parts I care about - maybe -c to compress it and ripgrep a subset out - is just fast. - I work in a lot of contexts with a lot of different systems, datacenters, applications - tmux lets me keep all of them cleanly organized in a separate windows and subpanes. I'll have 15-20 windows open per week, and maybe a 5-6 panes in each- keeping 100+ different contexts (and scroll backs, bash history) - all nicely organized is really useful. - I'm also a systems guy - and there is no other way to dig into a system but the terminal - netstat, ps, dmesg, /proc - these are all components that have only one credible path to investigation and discovery. If you aren't super comfortable in the terminal - zero way to learn about this stuff. - Working remotely - means ssh. So - once again - terminal. The Focus on the terminal is that it's the best tool (and in some cases the only tool) for so many of these tasks - and by performing these tasks a lot - you learn about systems - so the people who spend a lot of time in the terminal tend to know a lot more about systems than people who don't.
digitaltrees 3mo ago
Totally disagree. I find people still using cursor or other IDE centric flows want to review the code and be more interactive. Claude Code and Codex push agent autonomy and speed. Sorry but they go off the rails too much.
- ozim 3mo ago
  I am pissed off by people calling Cursor an IDE. VSCode it is based on is text editor. AI features are great but it is not IDE.
  - throwaway7783 3mo ago
    This. I hate VSCode as an IDE and is the reason why I have not used Cursor. I wish Jetbrains actually had some brains to build a better coding agent inside their IDEs (which I think are one of the best out there), but for now Im stuck with codex/cc + Jetbrains IDE
  - digitaltrees 3mo ago
    What do you define as an IDE then? I think something with an integrated terminal, file system and git UI is the essential set for most development.
    - waterTanuki 3mo ago
      IDE ships it's own compiler, debugger, usually some sort of container/container orchestrator and database tool. I.e. the things that separate hobby projects from production ones. VSCode has these things but they're extensions, not build into the editor
      - simondotau 3mo ago
        So long as I can do those things within the editor, it is an IDE in every respect other than pedantry.
        3mo ago
Pxtl 3mo ago
Honestly the TUI in most of these coding agents is so fancy I have trouble thinking of them as "terminal". I use Pi Coding Agent and the fact that it's terminal means it's easy to run inside something properly sandboxed in a YOLO mode using normal bash commands instead of relying on individually sandboxed tools. Once I got the tmux settings for proper scrolling and whatnot it feels fine. Honestly the TUI of tmux is the one that really enrages me - so much complexity for just "I want to switch terminals on my remote".
- fwip 3mo ago
  Zellij is a pretty good tmux alternative, with a UI that feels a lot friendlier.
  - ghshephard 3mo ago
    With the one caveat that it does not (yet) support copy/paste buffers or copying from the scroll back buffer. It’s also adamant that you use a mouse to select/copy - anything more complex and you need to pipe everything into neovim (or whatever text editor you use) and do your work there. I love zellij - it feels like the future - but hard to give up keyboard based select/copy and pulling from my scrollback.
dropofwill 3mo ago
Cursor has a terminal based app that’s just as good as any of the other mainstream ones…
- Jcampuzano2 3mo ago
  I know, I actually use it pretty often at work. I agree that its pretty on par with the others.
- 01100011 3mo ago
  Does it have a plugin library as extensive as Codex? I've started to leverage the plugin ecosystem to fuse data from chat history, wikis, emails, etc.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
discreteevent 3mo ago
Someone instructing AI through the terminal is a bit like an office worker with a tool belt. I don't think you can say anything about their coding ability until they are coding without AI. Even if thats in notepad.
- democracy 3mo ago
  Touche )))
- Jcampuzano2 3mo ago
  I actually never mentioned anything about actually using the AI tools integrated into Cursor in my post. I think I'd generalize my post more to say the more often somebody reaches for the terminal, in my anecdotal experience the more proficient they tend to be.
  - cyclopeanutopia 3mo ago
    Proficient in what, terminal use? :) Shocking!
ryanjshaw 3mo ago
I taught myself assembly language from a book on a 286, I cracked games with SoftICE as a teenager, tried out every Linux distribution in the 90s, and have been developing software professionally for 2 decades. I prefer Cursor. Am I an outlier or do you just judge people for weird reasons? I’ve never seen an IDE person judge a terminal person, it’s always the other way around - what’s up with that?
- Jcampuzano2 3mo ago
  Never said I was judging, just making an observation. And to answer - yes by book you would be an outlier. Its just an anecdotal experience.
- scubbo 3mo ago
  > Definitely not a 100% case.
- rvba 3mo ago
  Did you win the Putnam? If not, then don't be bolder than this guy
anon7000 3mo ago
I’m very comfortable with the terminal, but let’s be honest. It’s not very good at certain apps. For example, copy/pasting long bits of code or strings into and out of Claude code is highly annoying. Line breaks in weird spots, because of the terminal, for example. Anyways, I use cursor for a number of reasons: 1. I still want very quick access to the code in the editor. So I want the IDE. 2. Generally solid defaults. Auto-compaction, plan mode, etc, all work pretty well. 3. When I switched back to it from Claude code, it was genuinely faster at running Opus than Claude code. Claude code was grinding to a fucking halt every two minutes. 4. So annoying to search and view your chat history in Claude code. I’m a visual person. I also want all my repos loaded into a big workspace. Cursor also does that great out of the box. 5. I don’t have time to redo my terminal setup again to optimize it for Claude. Tbh, I’m not aware of much that Claude code does that you can’t also do in cursor. At the end of the day, the agent loop and tools are not that different, and the model is identical. The tool you use to prompt it is not the hard part. I just work faster when I have everything easily accessible in one spot, which was easier for me to accomplish with cursor than Claude. I found it just got out of my way.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

jwilber 3mo ago

I don’t think mapping tooling to ability makes sense here, particularly when the “advanced” tools here just abstract more away, though I agree that Cursor is terrible. So many useless windows.

mrits 3mo ago

I hate to be the one to break it to you but the weakest engineers are going to be producing just as much value

digitaltrees 3mo ago

Opposite. The weakest engineers trust CC or codex, stopped reviewing the code and push slop PRs. Those still acting in the loop move faster with better architecture and coding patterns and aren't losing their skills.

interestpiqued 3mo ago

You must be a joy to work with.