Haven’t used cursor but I assume it’s like other harnesses where the special sauce is in how it manages context, schedules sub agents, feeds them context, enforces standards, uses tools and skills etc. that make it better then just directly prompting the model.
For example you prompt opus directly with “refactor the auth flow” and it’s going to try and “one shot” it and produce the code from that prompt. Whereas a harness has instructions to say
Research the current implementation
Search the web for standards
Ask the user questions on how they want to do it
…
Haven’t used cursor but I assume it’s like other harnesses where the special sauce is in how it manages context, schedules sub agents, feeds them context, enforces standards, uses tools and skills etc. that make it better then just directly prompting the model.
For example you prompt opus directly with “refactor the auth flow” and it’s going to try and “one shot” it and produce the code from that prompt. Whereas a harness has instructions to say
Which produces way better results