the reason to use cursor nowadays isn't the IDE (though it's helpful perhaps once a week), but how it makes running models from multiple providers trivial out of the box. I don't have to juggle keys or drop to a shell tool call, it supports calling out to e.g. gemini in a subagent natively. I have multiple models cross-reviewing plans and diffs as a matter of course.
claude code was seriously annoying with the flickering, maybe it's fixed now, I don't know.
cursor also has a (bad) cli if you need it, it seems it's mostly used to setup remote agents, but it does the job in a pinch.
For what it's worth, flickering in CC has been fixed since around the beginning of the year.
I still saw a lot of flickering in VS Code (I simply use CC as a terminal in VS Code, without the plugin) as of 2 weeks ago. I think it's a combination of CC bugs + Electron(?) rendering the VS Code uses for terminal.
Moved on to Zed (native Rust rendering) 2 weeks ago -> nothing flickers.
Sadly, with Fable 5 cutoff, I am actively exploring CC alternatives. Pi/OMP.sh works great as an agent (definitely better than CC). GPT is seemingly not as good as Opus, but with better agent and better skills, it probaly won't matter anyway. GPT lets you use any agent on Pro subscription.
Maybe flickering, but it's still broken in various ways. Only a few days ago I had an issue where the text I was typing was outside of the textbox frame. Resizing the terminal still maintained the broken view.
OpenCode and Pi do those things as well, and without a whole annoying IDE bundled in.
OpenCode is miserable from a security perspective. Well clarification the plans they offer where they bundled in free models that train on your use. You are then left to use an OpenRouter which I find pretty flaky for at least the leading Chinese models.
I just use my ChatGPT subscription with it. Not sure what you mean about security.
“Well clarification the plans they offer where they bundled in free models that train on your use.”
Just what I said. They offer paid plans through their tool. Said paid plans are kind of a dark pattern where it’s not immediately obvious the models are training on your data. The harness is fine but that kind of business turns me off and I am usually pretty neutral about those sorts of things.