Cursor Sold Its Soul to the Vibe Coding Cult
And now I’m Back to VS Code...
I am fucking sick of being gaslit by my own IDE. I paid for Cursor, I recommended it to coworkers, and now I am watching it turn into a Salesforce dashboard for AI agents.
Before labeling me as “Anti AI”
People often label me as an “Anti AI” guy, because I am critical of the way AI is being used, but this is far from the truth...
I am not anti AI, I’m anti AI bullshit, I am against the way it’s being used to avoid thinking and the way AI propagandists want us to trade reliability, safety, and user experience for speed of development and developer laziness...
I used Cursor, I paid for it for a long time, and… I get “Composer 1.5” announcements blocking my todo list while I’m trying to debug firmware in C.
The chat panel haunts my screen like a poltergeist that refuses to go away.
Cursor insists that what I really need is a permanently visible AI agent, instead of taking away space for actual code.
I loved it, but now I hate it
The worst part is that I used to love Cursor, I used to recommend it to coworkers. It was the best IDE on the market.
When they acquired SuperMaven, the lightning fast tab completion model made all other IDEs look like shitty obsolete tools.
The productivity increase from the fast suggestions was a game changer.
Those subtle grey suggestions that appeared as you typed, an if err != nil here, a bounds check there, it was like pair programming but in an actually useful way.
Productive, unobtrusive, and fast.
Even now, nobody has come close to that experience. Copilot tries a lot, and their suggestion model (still running GPT-4.1) is not bad at suggesting code, but the latency is just too high. The pause while you wait for it to suggest something, often referred to as the “Copilot Pause”, is real, and it wastes time and kills the flow.
The beauty of good tab completion, the kind Cursor had with SuperMaven, is that it keeps me in control.
It suggests a ‘if err != nil’, a ‘if (ret != 0)’ and other small snippets while I am typing, and I can hit Tab to accept or just keep typing to ignore the gray text.
It’s a smarter IntelliSense, not a replacement for my brain. It is AI assistance, the kind that actually helps me write faster and better code, without taking control away from me.
I want to write code, and I want the LLM to help me type faster. There is a massive difference between those two things.
But then... the vibe coding trend on Twitter and SF VC space started to attract investors money, you have YC people talking about “writing” multiple thousand of lines of code a day, that they don’t review... And Cursor’s focus shifted from making the best AI assisted coding experience, to making the best vibe coding experience... And the cursor as an IDE experience went from increasing productive, to getting in the way of my work.
I Am the Pilot, Cursor want me to be a Passenger
Look, I get it. The shift is understandable. I still hate it, but I get it. Vibe coding is a trend that gets investor money.
If you are terminally online you probably see everyone jerking themselves off on twitter over how many lines of code their AI can write in a day, or how much they spend on tokens in a month, so the Vibe Coding trend seems extremely popular... You see artist using AI to generate code to make games using their arts, funny enough it’s usually the same artists that are against image generating AI... But that hypocrisy is another story for another day...
But stop reading twitter for a second, get out of the SF bubble, and actually talk to developers working in enterprise environments around the world, you realize something quickly... most developers don’t use AI tools that much, and they’re not interested in vibe coding. None of my coworkers are interested about having an Agent go through their codebase and make changes for them. Using GPT-5 to search something? Sure, most of us will do it. But it will often be on the OpenAI website, or a service that offer access to multiple model like T3 Chat, you don’t need an agent for that.
Why the disconnect? There’s a fundamental difference in philosophy between SF VCs and most enterprise developers I know.
Startups are focused on getting something out fast. Quality and safety are often second thoughts, if a thought at all.
But when you work in enterprise, your clients aren’t going to be happy if you break critical systems because you let an LLM take over.
SF is mostly shipping web stuff. If you ship a bad build because the LLM fucked up, it can be reverted in a few seconds.
But not everyone is shipping web dashboards and CRUD apps.
If you’re shipping embedded systems that can break itself, or kill someone if an LLM makes a bad edit, you don’t want to vibe code that.
I write firmware. I write code that runs on bare metal with less than 32KB of RAM and zero margin for error.
I ship systems that are in transit vehicles, trains and buses around the world. We communicate on the CAN bus of the vehicle — a single mistake and the entire system could fail, potentially causing accidents and endangering lives.
Move fast and break things works when you are building another AI wrapper for VC money. It is a fucking disaster when you are working on critical systems.
The Layout Is Gaslighting Me
Open Cursor on a new project and tell me what you see.
The chat panel is permanently welded to the right side like it is the second coming of Christ. It is not
.
I tried to fix this by closing the secondary sidebar, thinking I would get a clean workspace. But no, the chat is still there, taking up real estate, staring at me. Hiding the secondary sidebar just hide the agent list, but the chat is still there, haunting my screen... Until a few weeks or months ago, you could close it, but now they removed that customization option.
And here is the kicker: if you try to put anything useful in the secondary sidebar, like extensions or AI other tools, it fights with the chat tabs. The UI starts doing this weird dance where your tabs get buried behind chat history and agent nonsense.
VS Code, the editor they literally forked, already had that layout figured out. I can put Copilot Chat, Kilo Code, CodeRabbit, even my Twitch chat (it’s not AI, but it’s still a chat, so it belongs in the chat sidebar) in the secondary sidebar on the right. One keyboard shortcut and it is gone. So I can focus on what really matters, the code. I can read a full Tailwind line without horizontal scrolling. It is clean, it is customizable, and it respects that sometimes I just want to think without an AI chat that looks like it’s judging me for actually typing code.
Cursor is obsessed with making sure you know that the AI chat is there... They took a perfectly good UI and made it worse in service of a trend.
They took the flexibility of VS Code and locked it down to push their agent features.
It is the same kind of enshittification we see everywhere, optimize for the engagement metric (AI chat usage) instead of the user experience (writing code efficiently).
The Popups Are Harassment
This is a minor annoyance, but it sums up the attitude problem.
VS Code puts notifications in the bottom right. Small, unobtrusive, easy to ignore.
But Cursor...
Cursor puts a massive fucking popup in the bottom left covering my TODO list. “Cloud Agents with Computer Use!” “Composer 1.5!” I close it, and three days later it is back.
It feels like they see I don’t use their features, so they harass me with popups... but if I don’t use a feature, it’s because I didn’t have a need for it yet, not because I don’t know it exists.
It is the same desperate energy as a mobile game begging you to play with push notification. “Don’t forget to log in today for your daily reward!” ... I’m trying to work... debugging embedded C over a serial connection with a logic analyzer hooked up, and Cursor wants to tell me about their new AI model (that they distilled from Claude). Man... if I need to use it, the chat is already always open on the right, Composer is selected by default. I don’t need a popup to tell me that...
Back to Sanity
So here I am, writing this blog post in VS Code, my productivity is back, my sanity is back, and I have control over my IDE again.
The tab completion is not as good as Cursor (SuperMaven) was, for sure. I miss that speed.
But you know what I don’t miss? An IDE that wants to take over my codebase with an LLM, that wants to force me to use their chat, that harasses me with popups about features I don’t care about.
VsCode chat stay out of the way, until I need it, and I don’t feel any major difference in “intelligence” vs Cursor, both use the same models under the hood. And it cost less, I have gone from a 60$ subscription to a 40$ subscription, and I get more Agent usage, you really can’t beat the inference provided on pricing (most VsCode LLMs run on Azure).
I have my layout exactly how I want it, file explorer, outline, and todos on the left, terminal at the bottom where God intended, and all the AI chat bullshit banished to the right sidebar where I can hide it with a keyboard shortcut.
Cursor had potential. It really did. It was my daily driver IDE for a long time.
But they chose the SF VC crowd who think shipping broken code is fine because “we can just rollback” over the professional developers who need reliability and control.
They chose to optimize for AI agent usage instead of AI assisted coding experience.