I can only recommend to regularly measure how many tokens a harness+model combination uses for a certain task

There are huge token efficiency/bloat differences between agents while working on the same tasks, using the same model, in the same environment

Yesterday I ran 10 agentic tasks using GPT 5.6 Sol in an ubuntu 26.04 vm a couple of times with different harnesses and got vastly different token usage.

  +-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+
  | Harness     | API total | Input     | Cached    | Uncached  | Output |
  +-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+
  | smol        |   172,807 |   142,334 |     8,704 |   133,630 | 30,473 |
  | Pi          |   427,211 |   392,767 |   137,216 |   255,551 | 34,444 |
  | OpenCode    | 1,564,429 | 1,523,957 | 1,204,736 |   319,221 | 40,472 |
  | Codex       | 3,005,744 | 2,953,154 | 2,649,344 |   303,810 | 52,590 |
  | Hermes      | 3,856,611 | 3,808,231 | 3,167,232 |   640,999 | 48,380 |
  | Claude Code | 5,073,137 | 5,029,969 | 4,587,008 |   442,961 | 43,168 |
  +-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+

I'm not surprised that Claude Code is not optimized for an OpenAI model but I was still quite shocked re how much of a difference the harness makes.

Disclaimer: I'm working on 'smol' which is a minimalist harness but it's really nothing special, just a minimal system prompt, no skills files, only tool is shell

Do not underestimate how much popular harnesses are spamming the context window. The context window is very important.

I was an early and passionate adopter and paying customer of Cursor (since 2023!), but it’s probably been 6 months since I opened it.

These days I “write” code with claude code and codex, and read/review it on GitHub. If I need to read it locally, I use a plain text editor.

Can someone help me understand what value cursor offers in 2026?

(I work at Cursor)

You can still see what you’re billed on the Spending page. We did accidentally break dollar costs in the Usage CSV export yesterday while cleaning up an old feature flag. That was not intentional and the CSV export is fixed now.

That feature flag also showed a dollar usage graph to some self-serve users. The confusing part was included plan usage shown as $, which is not what you’re billed (on-demand usage is). Some people read it as actual spend, so we decided to remove that graph.

Elon will be paying his staff in tokens in the future. Grocery stores will have on-demand pricing shown in tokens, and prices will change from the time you pick up the product and you pay at the checkout. It’s Ok, Elon said money won’t exist soon anyway…

Cursor achieved fast adoption by making it simple to move from Visual Studio code.

Double-edged sword. It is also simple to move back to VS code and agent extensions.

Saw this at work yesterday. Absolute insanity to do something as user hostile as removing the cost of the service. There's no way to attempt to brand this as anything but negative for the user, and positive for the company.

Gotta justify a $60B purchase of an IDE and (at the time) a single, decent model.

If users start questioning the ROI of your AI product just hide the “I” from them. Problem solved.

Not showing the model cost in the Cursor UI is the biggest failure of Cursor.

That is how company gets greedy. Just archived that thread, wonder if cursor will close and remove it

Cursor was a great introduction to agentic engineering but I've learned their Claude pricing is largely just batch purchases. Their real moat I think is Composer 2.5 because both their agentic and IDE experiences fall short of Codex and Claude Desktop in my opinion. I think their sales will tell you economically they make the most sense and I would probably agree, but cost isn't everything especially when the spread isn't that wide. At this moment, capability is really king.

These days I'm using Codex and Claude Desktop with Zen when I need to look at code. Codex's real time audio chat feature (not dictation) is also second to none when paired with their agentic flow.

Cursor has been my corporate vendor for accessing non-anthropic models. Without cost insights and with no ability to proxy API requests its value drops dramatically. They fought hard for a renewal with legacy pricing mode then broke the deal soon thereafter. I’ll be extremely clear to leadership that Cursor usage should be minimized and not renewed. I frankly don’t trust them with IP either, and you shouldn’t either, especially if you’re demonstrably not in a big enterprise.

I think most standard users are intelligent enough to know if they’re on a subscription plan, the dollar amounts shown are if they were paying at API rates. This change is ridiculous.

This month I've noticed that my Cursor model use has gone up faster with Composer 2.5 - I have bothered with Grok yet. Despite the advertised twice-the-usage on Cursor own models I'd say it's burning faster.

They just don't want you feel obligated to thank them SO MUCH for hidden better prices

I am shocked, shocked, that a company that is part of SpaceXAI would become hostile to its existing paying users and partners. This has never happened before in history.

Small thing but makes a big difference

I’ve been working on a project to solve this problem with Claude code, codex, etc by recording usage and translating to $ in realtime. Looks like I’ll have to add Cursor support now.

The ground-truth is the rudeness is load bearing at human machine interface.

cursor is a scam. they pissed me with their UI changes & shady pricing, so i tried claude code recently for the first time and instantly regreted i havent tried earlier

Well ... don't use Cursor. It's really that simple.

It's free? Oh it's priced in "tokens".

Kind of (barely) like how Facebook has "friends". Or how a Snickers bar costs $1.99 and not $2.

Abstracting meaning of "cost", reducing value of information. Maximizing profits. Enshittification.

Cursor you have a beautiful comeback story, you have a wonderful model with Composer 2.5, and a terrific behemoth with Grok 4.5 now. A top-tier dev ux with the Cursor agent app, why on earth are you squandering this opportunity and behaving this way?

You came back from the dead pretty much and now you're pissing it away for what exactly?

Do not spite your individual developer customers or you will perish yet again.

Yet another reminder that the companies providing the AI tools everyone is so gaga over are in it to make money off of you. They can and will engage in rugpulling, deception, and other shenanigans to take your money.

Elon-ification begins...