Both get lumped together as 'AI coding tools,' which hides the more useful distinction: one lives in your terminal and drives the whole workflow, the other lives in your editor and assists it line by line.
Anthropic's Claude Code runs as an agent in your terminal with direct access to your shell and file system, permission-gated per action. Cursor is a fork of VS Code with AI-assisted editing built into the interface itself. One is agentic and task-driven, the other is an editor with a very good autocomplete and inline chat.
Multi-file tasks that need to run commands and verify their own work — a failing test suite, a refactor across a dozen files, a deployment script that needs to actually execute and check its own output.
Fast, line-by-line editing where you want to stay in the driver's seat the whole time — tab-completing a function body, quick inline fixes without handing off a whole task.
Yes — many developers use Cursor for in-editor line-level work and Claude Code for larger, multi-step tasks run from the terminal. They're not mutually exclusive.
Neither is inherently easier — Cursor's interface is more familiar if you already use VS Code; Claude Code's permission model gives more explicit control over what gets changed.