These days I “write” code with claude code and codex, and read/review it on GitHub. If I need to read it locally, I use a plain text editor.
Can someone help me understand what value cursor offers in 2026?
To answer your question though, to me your workflow seems cumbersome. Cursor is more integrated and more frictionless.
1) It's still an IDE. Because of pricing I mostly use Codex, but I always have a VSCode/Cursor IDE open, thus have to juggle between the two. Working directly in the IDE is more comfortable. For full on vibecoding that might be worse, but when you want to do a deep review of the changes, an IDE is way better than reading a diff on github.
2) It supports every model. It's often very helpful to try different models when you don't like the result of the first.
Unless by "text editor" you mean Neovim or Emacs ?
I'd totally buy a $5 Cursor subscription just for Cursor Tab (it would replace VS Code for me). The $20 point is too competitive now.
The move that actually works is the opposite: make it legible. Show the breakdown, show what drove the spike, let people reconcile it against their own expectation. A scary number you can explain beats a hidden one they have to guess at.
Removing the CSV export is the part that stings most, because that's the one thing power users reach for the moment they stop trusting the dashboard.
Double-edged sword. It is also simple to move back to VS code and agent extensions.
These days I'm using Codex and Claude Desktop with Zen when I need to look at code. Codex's real time audio chat feature (not dictation) is also second to none when paired with their agentic flow.
You came back from the dead pretty much and now you're pissing it away for what exactly?
Do not spite your individual developer customers or you will perish yet again.
There are huge token efficiency/bloat differences between agents while working on the same tasks, using the same model, in the same environment
Yesterday I ran 10 agentic tasks using GPT 5.6 Sol in an ubuntu 26.04 vm a couple of times with different harnesses and got vastly different token usage.
+-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+
| Harness | API total | Input | Cached | Uncached | Output |
+-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+
| smol | 172,807 | 142,334 | 8,704 | 133,630 | 30,473 |
| Pi | 427,211 | 392,767 | 137,216 | 255,551 | 34,444 |
| OpenCode | 1,564,429 | 1,523,957 | 1,204,736 | 319,221 | 40,472 |
| Codex | 3,005,744 | 2,953,154 | 2,649,344 | 303,810 | 52,590 |
| Hermes | 3,856,611 | 3,808,231 | 3,167,232 | 640,999 | 48,380 |
| Claude Code | 5,073,137 | 5,029,969 | 4,587,008 | 442,961 | 43,168 |
+-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+
I'm not surprised that Claude Code is not optimized for an OpenAI model but I was still quite shocked re how much of a difference the harness makes.
Disclaimer: I'm working on 'smol' which is a minimalist harness but it's really nothing special, just a minimal system prompt, no skills files, only tool is shell
Do not underestimate how much popular harnesses are spamming the context window. The context window is very important.
hnnbxu2nwi•48m ago