Should you use Claude Code or Cursor?

I'm shipping more software than I ever have. And it's not because I suddenly became a better coder. In fact, I haven't coded professionally in about 10 years. I'm gonna show you the setup I use to build real products incredibly fast with AI. I'm Pete, and I run a software development agency in New York City. We build products for startups and Fortune 500 companies. The core idea is that if you wanna move fast with AI, it's not about chasing new tech. It's about pairing the strongest AI tools with the most established technology that the models actually understand. Once I aligned those two things, everything changed. My speed, my confidence, and how much I could ship each week. Let's start with big picture set up. So I use Claude Code AND I use Cursor. The two of them do different jobs. Cursor is my IDE. It's where I navigate the code base, review changes, and make small edits when I want to inject my opinion. But I'm not actually writing large code blocks anymore. That's Claude Code's responsibility. So here's the layout. Editor on the left, split terminals on the right. On the left third of the screen is Cursor's file tree editor and AI Panel. And on the right, I have two terminal windows side by side within Cursor. Both are running Claude Code. One terminal is dedicated to frontend and the other is dedicated to backend. And that separation is intentional. The backend agent is writing APIs, testing them, and documenting it for the frontend. At the same time, the frontend agent is fixing bugs or building UI. That consumes those APIs. They're building in parallel, and I stay in the loop and I coordinate between them. I've learned that more than two agents at once will actually hurt quality. Like someone has to review and QA and make sure that things are actually correct. You can automate some of that, but you really need a human in the loop. I do a lot more within the setup, servers, custom skills, async sub agents. But that additional leverage is only possible because of the foundation that I have in place. Last thing I'll mention because I get a lot of questions about my preferred stack, so I stick to the most proven technologies. Here's a list you can screenshot, or you should head to the free Substack article I just posted where I cover all this in detail. There's a link in my bio.