Cursor 3: How to read or edit code

As far as I can tell in the new ‘Agent UI’ there is no mechanism for me to read or edit my codebase. Sure there’s a notepad like diff view, but it lacks any code navigation or analysis tools.

AI is not close to the point where I never need to do these tasks, particularly reading and navigating. With hallucination rates per task still well into the 30s, I almost always need to verify almost every claim the agent makes about the codebase by personally navigating. And while I rarely type much code, I’m constantly having to correct the AI at the microtask level (literally ‘that function name is confusing, that syntax is wrong, your forgot to update the tests’)

Surely there is some way in the new UI to switch to an IDE right? Some sort of ‘open in editor’ option?

Without that, the UI is functionally useless. For our codebase, this sort of ‘let the agent do it and review’ flow remains too unreliable for day to day use by far.

As a design perspective, it makes sense to allow users to chose their level of granularity on a case by case basis.

Hey, thanks for the request. In Cursor 3, switching between Agent view and the classic Editor view works like this:

  1. Cmd+Shift+N from the Agents window opens a separate Editor window.

  2. cursor --classic in the terminal launches Cursor in classic IDE mode without Glass.

About the feedback on granularity, I agree it’s an important point. The team knows not every workflow fits a pure agent plus review model, and they’re working on making the UI more flexible.

Let me know if any of this doesn’t work.

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