The two coding agents and interfaces I have used the most are Claude and Cursor. In Cursor I have jumped around between the IDE view and the modern Agent view. In Claude, I started with Claude Code, then moved to Claude Code on desktop, and I have been jumping back and forth ever since.
Cursor started on the safe bet of forking VS Code and making it the hell better for AI. Their Agents view was daring. Making it the default instead of the traditional IDE view was even more daring. I believe it worked.
Claude Code was daring as well with their TUI. Probably the best one. Although I haven’t tested OpenCode enough. Bringing Claude Code to the Desktop was also daring.
I have always admired how Anthropic innovates on their desktop app. Although it’s their core product (I believe), they are not afraid to move the people’s cheese. They constantly reshuffle the layout. Although they kind of keep the spirit, they do introduce changes that sometimes take a couple of days to get used to.
It’s very interesting to watch approaches. It seems Cursor was developer first, then slowly moving outside of developers. Innovation happens but the disruption of the UI with changes is less common.
Anthropic probably was knowledge work first, which included developers via Claude Code in the terminal, then they have been introducing a lot of crazy changes in the desktop app until developers are part of the desktop app club.
In both cases I have liked most of the changes.
I have already talked about projects. Cursor is superior. It is easy to set up an environment. It is easy to set up env vars. Piece of cake.
Claude now has the term environments in their desktop app as well. It is very weird though. The way you define it is weird. Env vars and secrets are weird. I wonder if their target market is knowledge workers who want to do code and maybe this is the best way to present to them. Idk but I did not like it.
I love how both companies introduce changes in the UI and UX. They dare to challenge the status quo, although it’s not always the best.