It’s existed for a long time, is quite good, and it is under-marketed (ironic for this thread).
(Double-ironic disclosure… I work for Cursor. If you have ideas to make agent better hmu)
This is just the old "surely nobody actually likes Lady Gaga, all the people I actually know think her stuff sucks, it's just all bought and paid for" reasoning trap all over again...
If someone is clear about offering an anecdote, it's dishonest to pretend as if they were making a real and reasoned argument.
So much so that i've yet to invest in CC. Finally downloaded the desktop app but use it exclusively for chat and cowork.
Cursor's purgatory UX is what'll finally get me to invest in CC and codex. Not model performance.
I do think there's a caveat that it's pretty standard nextjs with rails api.
edit: found your blog post about your experience, i'll read it! https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/
edit2: maybe it's because i spend a lot of time being clear with small and surgical asks after doing purely thought exploring prompts to confirm and home in on approaches. At the point I hit build or do Agent mode, Composer is mostly always spot on.
with Opus (haven't tried) maybe people are doing large-scale multi phase and single shot prompts that trigger a swarm of sub agents?
But then I think maybe not really? Granted, I'm not orchestrating 100 Agents doing overnight work. But relating this to your point, if the CC-camp + HN hadn't proclaimed otherwise, I would have no idea what breakthrough CC+Opus made. (Cursor was first with plan mode right?)