Claude Code is better at understanding legacy code you didn't write. Cursor is better at generating net-new features fast. That's the whole comparison — everything else is details.
I've been running both on a production Django/React app for six months. Here's what actually matters.
Where Claude Code Wins
Claude Code reads context better than anything I've tested. My authentication middleware was failing intermittently. I pasted the error. Claude traced it through four middleware layers, found the race condition in my session store, and explained why it only happened under load.
I never told it we were using Redis. It figured that out from imports.
