The terminal won. Do not @ me.
If you've been living under a rock, Anthropic shipped Claude Code as a terminal-native agent and the internet collectively lost its mind. Then everyone quietly cancelled their Cursor subscriptions.
The Setup
Claude Code lives in your shell. No IDE fork, no extension marketplace, no electron bloat. You point it at a repo and it reads everything it needs — including a project-level CLAUDE.md that primes it with your conventions.
{`# install once, run anywhere
npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code
cd ~/Documents/GitHub/velocity8.5
claude`}The Money Pattern
I use this on Aidxn Design and Rebuild Relief repos every day. A tight CLAUDE.md at the project root turns Claude Code from a chatbot into a coworker who already knows the stack — Astro 5, Supabase, Pipedrive, the lot.
{`# CLAUDE.md
## Stack
- Astro 5 + Tailwind 4 + TypeScript strict
- Supabase (RLS-first), Netlify Functions
- Pipedrive for CRM events
## Rules
- Never add font-family declarations to components
- Use \`px-5 md:px-10 lg:px-16\` for side padding
- Server components by default
## Slash commands
- /deploy → run \`npm run build\` then \`netlify deploy --prod\`
- /rls → audit RLS policies on the current schema`}Slash commands are the killer feature. Drop a markdown file in .claude/commands/ and it becomes a reusable prompt. My /rls command has saved me from shipping at least three insecure tables this quarter.
The Catch
There is no visual diff UI. Cursor's inline accept/reject flow is genuinely nicer for surgical edits. Claude Code shows you a unified diff in the terminal and asks for permission — which is faster once you're used to it, but the first hour feels weird if you've lived in an IDE your whole career.
Also: long sessions chew through tokens. The 1M context window is glorious until you remember context isn't free. Use /compact early and often.
The Verdict
Cursor is still great if you want AI in an IDE. But for agentic work — multi-file refactors, repo-wide audits, "fix every failing test and explain why" — Claude Code wins on raw capability and on price. The terminal was never the limitation. We were.