The reason is abundantly clear. Cursor was just a GPT wrapper with a nice UI/UX (which was very nice when it came out) it has some other models like autocomplete as well, but its still a wrapper. OpenAI and Anthropic build and train models specifically to work via CLI driven processes, which is why they are so much better now. Cursor is basically dead as I'm sure they realized they get much better performance with the CLI/agentic approach.
> OpenAI and Anthropic build and train models specifically to work via CLI driven processes,
Cursor agents open terminals just fine in VSCode and is a major part of how Cursor works.
I personally code in VSCode text editor prior to Cursor (left VIM a while ago) and prefer to stay in the context of a desktop text editor. I find it's easier to see what's changing in real time, with a file list, file tabs, top level and inline undo buttons etc.
I've even stopped tabbing to a separate terminal by about 50%, I learned to use VSCode terminals to run tests and git commands, which works well once you learn the shortcuts + integrate it into some VSCode test runner extensions. Plus Cursor added LLM/autocomplete to terminal commands which is great. I don't need a separate CLI tool or Bash/zsh script inside terminal to inject terminal commands I forgot the arguments for.
you're missing that open ai and anthropic are finetuning their models for their coding agents, i.e. using rl and annotating datasets and optimizing for them with directly learnable parameters. Cursor is just able to use whatever foundational model apis are available (not sure if or when labs might give programmatic access to coding agents). I'm sure they are trying to train OSS models but those fall way short performance wise of proprietary ones.
