Cursor 3 is so much worse than Cursor 2 that I spent time looking for another IDE yesterday. I thought they really understood how I wanted to work with AI but that trust has been totally shattered. I tried Windsurf but it doesn't have useful git worktree support. I also tried native VSCode with some plugins and Claude Code CLI. All were disappointing and I'm back on Cursor today.

I feel so alone as a Cursor user, I feel like everyone I know is doing CLI development. For me the development bottleneck is reviewing and manually testing AI generated code. Both of these are much easier in an IDE. The UI to approve each hunk of changes the AI made is key for me (after it's done, not the interactive permissions prompts that claude insists on unless you use yolo mode). I need to be able to quickly see more context around the lines the AI changed, click through call hierarchies and go to definition.

Then I want a dashboard that lists all my agents working in different worktrees and I need to be able spawn a new one quickly. And I want to quickly switch between worktrees and have the associated agent chat all right there. And I want all of this in one window.

I'm sure this is all possible on the command line if you spend enough time configuring tmux and vim, but I'm worried that my workflow is going to change in another few months and I'd have to do it all again. So for now I'm reinstalling Cursor 2 and I'll check back in on 3 in a few weeks.

I have never heard the phrase "belt-and-suspenders" before last week but Opus 4.7 finds an opportunity to use it multiple times per day.

Another AI pattern I'm really digging lately is managing my home server with Cursor + ansible. I run a few dozen docker containers and I've always managed the server with SSH, vim, and docker CLI. I don't want an AI agent mucking around on the machine and uploading who-knows-what as context to foreign servers.

But for recent containers I have started a repo locally on my Mac where I have Claude or Composer write ansible scripts to deploy compose files and start the services. This feels like the best of both worlds to me: AI can blast out changes much faster than I can, but it doesn't have any access to the actual server and I can easily see exactly what it's going to do before I execute the playbook myself. This has allowed me to layer on additional functionality like creating a zfs dataset and ACL for every container which was too much work to do manually.

I spent some time over the weekend setting up a hermes AI agent on my old gaming PC. It took a lot of fiddling but I finally have some models running locally on it that make it feel like a slower slightly stupider version of claude. It feels so good to finally have a fully local stack.

There are a lot of boring chores in my life that I want AI to do and that it's probably capable of, but up until now I have refused to share much personal information with any of the big companies. I'm hoping that I can build up trust with a local agent and gradually make it more useful over time. I gave it an email address and already have it submitting some receipts for reimbursement (after approval by me) which feels like a good start.

Instead of waiting for an app developer to fix the bug I reported I just one-shotted a replacement app with Opus. Achievement unlocked?

Every couple months I do a race where I have some agents go off and build a feature or fix a bug while I do it myself in Cursor. The time I spend reviewing and fixing the agent's work always end up being longer and more painful, which is I haven't switched over to an "agent command-center" style of software dev.

I do kick off worktree agents here and there throughout the day to make minor changes that come up while I'm working on a larger branch. But those are side quests while I work on the main thing.

Cursor's Composer 2 model is performing much worse for me than Composer 1 :( I feel like Composer 1 really hit a sweet spot for me between speed and quality.

For me the bottlenecks for coding with AI are:
- understanding all the code that the model wrote
- testing changes

Composer 1 really helped with the first because it could blast out small amounts of code that I could quickly review without my brain getting bored and context switching to something else. I feel like I'm an outlier in that I'm trying to stay heavily involved in the dev flow rather than having a multiple agents work on long tasks and then coming back in cold to review their work. Is anyone else using smaller quicker models in this way?