I've been using Cursor, Claude Code, and OpenAI Codex together for about half a year on a BIM product, and the question I keep getting is which one is "best." After switching between them way more times than I'd like to admit, I've come to think the question itself is wrong. They're three different answers to three different problems, and treating them as competitors just makes you frustrated.
Here's roughly how I split the work. Cursor lives inside VS Code and its Tab model is the only one I trust to keep me in flow when I'm writing new code. I press Tab, it predicts the next block, I keep going. Claude Code runs in my terminal and it's where I send the messy stuff, refactors that span six files, plans I want written down before anyone touches anything, anything where I need a 1M token context. Codex is the one I throw parallel jobs at. Last Tuesday I queued up five cleanup tasks and walked away for twenty minutes. That part genuinely works, and I haven't found a way to replicate it in Cursor or Claude Code.
The combo that finally stopped feeling wasteful costs me around $120 a month, Claude Code pro plus Codex pro. I let Claude Code write the analysis and the plan, I hand it to Codex to execute, and Cursor handles the small in-the-moment edits that I can't stand doing by hand. The Hooks in Claude Code also catch lint and test failures before anything gets committed, which is the real reason I stopped trusting "AI wrote this PR" without a check.
That said, I'm not sure this combination is right for everyone. A solo developer paying $40 a month with Cursor Pro and Claude Code pro is probably in better shape than I am for the first six months. And the Codex PRs can be wildly inconsistent, sometimes clean enough to merge, sometimes nonsense that I have to rewrite from scratch, so I'd budget real review time. There's also a chance the whole toolchain looks different in a year. For now though, the hammer-screwdriver analogy is the only one that matches what I've actually felt using them.
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