Claude Code is the engine, Cursor is the cockpit

My daily workflow looks nothing like it did a year ago. A lot has landed in Claude Code recently. Skills replaced custom slash commands, subagents and plugins followed, and four days ago /goal shipped, which lets an agent run autonomously for hours or days against a completion condition. Cursor 3 came out with an agents-first interface and a cheap in-house model. MCP went from "interesting protocol" to how every tool plugs into every other tool. The net effect is that I now run Claude Code as the primary engine and treat Cursor as the cockpit. Cursor is where I drop in when I want a GUI, design mode, or a real-time view of a diff landing. Most everything else, including the long-running stuff, lives in Claude Code. Five patterns that stuck. Pattern 1: Claude Code is the engine, Cursor is the cockpit The biggest mindset shift was treating the two tools as different categories of thing rather than competitors. Claude Code runs in the terminal with Opus 4.7 behind it, and i