Vibe Coding Killed Cursor

Summary

For almost 1.5 years after the release of ChatGPT, the question of which LLM should you use had an obvious answer: there was GPT 4 and there was everyone else. Now, at the end of 2025, there are dozens of LLMs to choose from, and navigating the space if you're not a terminally online user of X is almost impossible. Well, it was until I wrote this post. To demonstrate my street creds, look at my Cursor wrapped: it shows I joined 666+Cursor didn't expect such veterans to still use their app? days ago, which is roughly March 4, 2024, the release date of Sonnet 3 by Anthropic. Since then, I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. GPT4 one-shotting creating a matplotlib projection of a protein structure to a 2D space, all in a single chat message. I watched the 03-25 checkpoint of Gemini 2.5 Pro show full reasoning traces. All those moments... Anyway, this post is both an ultimate guide to LLMs in 2026 and a commentary on the general state of AI, how we've got here, and where we're going. My thoughts are grouped by use cases. Use Case 1: Writing Code TL;DRMy overall take is that vibe coding is a huge distraction; it's actively killing Cursor (which is why I stopped using it). You should remain in charge, and best way to do that is to either not use agentic workflows at all (just talk to Gemini 2.5/3 Pro in AI Studio) or use OpenCode, which is like Claude Code, but it shows you all the code changes in git diff format, and I honestly can't understand how anyone would settle for anything else. In OpenCode, use latest Sonnet model (today it's 4.5) for most tasks, switch to latest Opus (today it's 4.5) for complex tasks. You can get that for just $20/mo (the Claude Pro plan, which includes usage of Claude Code, and you can use that plan to authorize OpenCode). If you're rich or have a company that's willing to cover the cost, you can switch to $100/mo or $200/mo plans, which will let you use Opus more frequently (see your usage here). Vibe coding is killing Cursor Being a...