The strategy behind the shift: Why MarsBased left Cursor for Claude Code

At MarsBased, we did not jump on the AI coding train the moment GitHub Copilot appeared. When AI-assisted development first started gaining traction, Copilot mostly meant code autocomplete. And to be honest, we were not impressed. The suggestions were often more distracting than helpful. We spent too much time correcting what it generated, and not enough time benefiting from it.

That matters when your team is made up of highly specialized engineers. For some, Copilot felt promising. For many others, it simply was not useful enough to justify the interruption. There was also a practical issue: we were not all using the same setup. Some engineers worked in RubyMine, others in Visual Studio Code, others in Neovim, and so on. Standardizing around Copilot was not easy at the time.

The Cursor chapter

Then Cursor arrived, and for us that was the real beginning of coding with agents. We signed up in mid-2024 and a large part of the engineering team moved to Cursor fairly quickly. For those who preferred sticking with editors like Neovim, we looked for alternatives so they could also experiment with agent-based workflows.

Cursor felt like a genuine step forward. You could not reliably generate large, complex features end to end, but it was extremely useful for smaller, focused tasks: writing helper functions, generating automated tests, assisting with translations, or handling small refactors. We spent months experimenting with agent modes, testing more capable models for specific tasks, and gradually expanding how we used AI. But coding with agents was still not at the core of how our engineers worked.

Shifting focus: From code to planning

That started to change when some of our early AI adopters began experimenting with tools like OpenCode and more capable models like Claude Opus. The shift was subtle at first, but important. The focus moved away from writing code and toward planning.

That is when we started to realize that Cursor, despite its strengths, was beginning to hold us back. To be clear, Cursor is a very good product. But it is still a full-featured IDE, designed first and foremost as a place to write code manually.

That becomes a limitation when your mental model changes. In a more agent-centric workflow, the engineer’s role shifts from typing code to defining problems, iterating on solutions, verifying results, and steering the process. The AI writes the code. The human provides direction, context, and judgment.

Cursor can absolutely be used that way. We have proven it in our internal benchmarks. But the experience comes with friction, because the environment is still optimized for manual coding.

The decision to standardize on Claude Code

At MarsBased, we are now in the middle of a major transition. We want every engineer to know how to use AI effectively when writing software, while maintaining strong guarantees around security, performance, and quality. We also need a tooling setup that is independent of any specific IDE or code editor.

That is why we have decided to standardize across the company on Claude Code.

This gives us something we were missing: a shared, focused environment for coding with agents that does not force everyone into the same editor. People who use Neovim can keep using Neovim. People who prefer Visual Studio Code, or VS Code-based forks, can still use them to inspect diffs, review changes, or make small edits.

On my side, I have installed Zed, which I had wanted to try for a long time but never really had a reason to, since AI had been so tightly tied to Cursor in my workflow until now.

Building the future of MarsBased

We have already started sharing how we work with Claude Code across the team. We are identifying reusable patterns, defining workflows that everyone can benefit from, and thinking through the skills we want to standardize. We have even started building internal MarsBased plugins so the whole company can take advantage of what we are learning.

A lot is changing very quickly: new tools, new habits, new mental models. But our goal at MarsBased is not just to adopt the latest thing. It is to make sure nobody gets left behind. We want to move forward together as a team, and use this transition to become a better company.

So yes, goodbye Cursor. And thanks for opening the door to agentic coding for us.