switched from cursor to claude code last week, the terminal thing threw me
ex data eng, retooling. cursor felt like an editor with ai bolted on, claude code feels like the opposite, its a shell that happens to edit files. took me a day to stop reaching for the sidebar. the diff review flow is nicer than i expected tho. what did people miss coming over? feels like i lost the tab-complete muscle memory
i did the same jump in spring and the terminal is the whole point, don't fight it. the mental model that fixed it for me: cursor is an editor with AI bolted on, claude code is an agent that happens to live in your shell and edits files as a side effect. once i stopped expecting it to behave like an IDE and started treating it like i'm delegating a task to a junior who reads the repo, it clicked. the thing that actually burned me was letting it re-read the whole tree every turn, scope it to the files that matter and your limit lasts a lot longer