That's basically it. You can review changes afterwards, but that's not the main point of Claude Code. It's a different workflow. It's built on the premise: given a tight and verifiable plan, AI will execute the actual coding correctly. This will work, mostly, if you use the very best models with a very good and very specific harness.
Cursor, same as Copilot, has been used by people who are basically pair programming with the AI. So, on abstraction down.
I have no idea what is better, or faster. I suspect it depends at least on the problem, the AI, and the person.
This is not really true anymore.
Cursor has better cloud agents than Claude. The multi-agent experience is better, the worktree management is better. Tagging specific code or files in chat is better.
It's hard for me to express the level of pain and frustration I feel going from Cursor to Claude / Conductor+Claude / Claude Extension for VS Code, Claude in Zed, etc.
Really hoping Claude puts more energy into Cowork as a competitor for Cursor and Codex.
Instead they are defining architecture through specs and verification-loops and attempting to one-shot solutions fitting clear tests. On reflection, I personally don't have many prompts with CC referencing files or code directly, rather I speak in specifications I can then track to a given instance of work in review.
This isn't to suggest you can't work at this abstraction in cursor or w/e interface, but the features you suggest are hardly relevant to the divide zwaps is identifying.
I'm not telling you to go use cursor, just to help clarify that you can drive both solutions with the exact same approach and skillset and get very similar results - the difference is the UI. I personally like being able to paste screenshots into the agent, etc.
Then when you go back to Cursor it will still support all of those things in the settings.
Using Cursor you tend to not think about those as much since Cursor does a lot of it for you as part of the IDE integration. But it's good to refine it your own way.
But for the most part there isn't much difference.
Zed plus Claude feels more like using isolated browser extensions instead of something part of the browser (unless you pay for Zeds AI thing then the integration is marginally better).