In my opinion no frontier model is the best at everything, especially if you're having to catch it up with pre-existing information about your project or an esoteric scripting language, that being said, with Cursor you can try out all of the popular available models and get a feel for which do better with which tasks, in my experience - Codex is a okay model but use light thinking if you value your time, Gemini 3 flash is where its been at for me recently if I need to do big changes I go to that, And cursors model composer is good for making plans or doing refactors / making rules. Cursor gives you tools to make prompting feel like less of a repetition game, so you worry more about the task at hand and its been super efficient for me. I don't use proper version control so the fact it saves a history of every files dif's, and you can jump back easily in chats and regress the code base is the game changer.

There more stuff in mine, but at the top of my ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md file, I have:

    ## Important Instructions
    
    - update todo.md as items are completed
    
    **Commit to git after making code changes.** Check `git status` first - only commit if there are actual changes:
    ```bash
    # If not in a git repository, initialize it first:
    git init
    
    # Then commit changes:
    git add <FILES_UPDATED>
    # Be surgical - add only the changes you just made.
    git commit -m "Description of changes"

I push most work into chat interface (attach full codebase as a single file, paste in specs, describe what I want), then copy the tasklist from chat into codex. This is to reduce codex token usage to avoid breaching weekly limits. I'd use a more agent-heavy process if I didn't care about cost.