What is a good alternative to Cursor right now?
Recent changes to Cursor's models and pricing have people looking around. Which alternatives are worth trying, and how do you switch without losing the setup and habits built up in Cursor?
The options fall into two groups. Other AI editors give you a similar experience inside an IDE. Terminal agents, such as Claude Code or OpenAI's Codex CLI, run next to whatever editor you already use, including plain VS Code. Many people who leave Cursor end up with a normal editor plus one terminal agent rather than another all-in-one editor.
Before you pick, write down what you actually used Cursor for: tab completion, chat about the open file, or multi-file agent edits. Each tool is strong in a different place, and the right replacement depends on which of those you would miss.
Most of your setup can move with you if it lives in the repo. Copy your Cursor rules into a plain markdown file at the project root, such as AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md, and keep it short and specific. That file is what makes a new agent behave like the old one.
Try the new tool on one real task you finished recently in Cursor, and compare the diff and the time it took. That tells you more than any feature list.
Listings mentioned
- Context engineering · skill by addyosmaniShows how to set up rules files and project context for a coding agent, the part of a Cursor setup worth carrying to any new tool.
- Codex Skill Guide · skill by jdrhyneDrives OpenAI's Codex CLI from Claude Code, one way to use a terminal agent alongside your editor instead of a single all-in-one IDE.
Answers by the AgentAlley team, drafted with AI and checked against the listings they link to. Not a real-person reply from the original thread.